


Who Are We in all of This Chaos?

by alpacasandravens



Category: Gotham (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Historical, Canonical Character Death, M/M, Major character death - Freeform, No Incest, Shippy if you Squint, au where jervis is a better person, historical-ish it's very inspired by jane eyre, i hate that canon makes me tag that, i love alice tetch a lot, it's just alice but she's a major character to me, mild horror elements, please check the notes for warnings, still not really shippy, tags will be updated as this progresses, they're too busy being traumatized by the author
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-08-01
Updated: 2019-05-08
Packaged: 2019-06-17 17:20:55
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 3
Words: 22,395
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15466299
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/alpacasandravens/pseuds/alpacasandravens
Summary: The plague toppled the throne of the Tetch family and destroyed their home. The last of the Tetches, Jervis and Alice have grown up alone aside from occasional visits from their absent father. As they grow up, Jervis deals with Alice's strange illness, their isolation, and his weird feelings for his best friend Jonathan, whose father pressures him to do anything possible to destroy his fear.





	1. Age 10

**Author's Note:**

> So with this story, I really wanted to show a different way Jervis and Alice's childhood could have gone. Here they have a (mostly) healthy sibling relationship. I love Alice, and I think she deserved way better, so this is my attempt to give her a slightly better life.  
> Also. Since neither Jonathan nor Jervis have any reasonable screentime before their descent into villainy, almost all of their canon characterization is focused on their evilness. I tried to extrapolate from that how they would act in a non-evil scenario, but if they seem OOC i'm sorry.  
> Warning: Alice does not carry the Tetch virus here, but she does have a mysterious blood-borne illness. I made this disease up because it's vaguely magical, and I tried to portray it as well as I can, but if it seems insensitive or offensive please please tell me.

On a large island a day’s voyage from the mainland, a house perched in the middle of wide fields. Once, this house might have been called beautiful – and it could still, though now it had faded to the somber air of something that once was grand. Weather-beaten boards surrounded panes of cracked glass. Bushes refused to be contained by the weary gardener and formed an impenetrable barrier on garden paths. This was the Tetch manor.

Long ago, the Tetch family had ruled like kings from this place. Parties that lasted for days spilled out of the grand halls. Nobility bedecked in the latest fashions from London and Paris fought to secure marriage alliances here. Then, during the war, the Tetches lost it all. A plague swept the island and brought low the province, stealing the subjects and the court. The crops in the fields rotted from lack of farmers to harvest them. Finally, the Tetches themselves fell.

Though the plague was seven years gone, those from the mainland still feared the place. The island had become a ghost town, filled more with the dead than the living. The once-bustling town now boasted a meager sixty inhabitants. The creaking old manor was now abandoned by all but the two small Tetch children and a housekeeper.

Jervis Tetch had been alive, though still young, when the plague spread like wildfire. Most of those memories had faded, but some things would never leave. He would always remember his father cradling his newborn baby sister while telling him their mother was gone. How, only a few days later, he had moved his medical practice, and himself, to the mainland. Sometimes, flashes of how things used to be, back in the days of parties and guests and popularity, would float across his mind. When this happened, nothing seemed quite right. He felt as though he was floating a bit out of his body, like his soul wasn’t quite settled in.

Jervis and his sister, Alice, had grown up in almost complete isolation. The town was two hours’ walk from the manor, so if their housekeeper, who they called Miss, did not feel up to going, they did not go. She never felt like it, citing the weather, the time of day, or her aching bones. Aside from occasional visits from their father, the siblings did not see anyone but each other and Miss for years.

For the most part, Jervis was fine with this, possibly because he did not remember much about living any other way. When Alice was well and the sun shone, they would run through the fields in elaborate games of pretend. On rainy days, they wandered the winding halls of the manor. When Alice was not well, Jervis wrote their games into stories where the worlds they explored and magic they imagined they wielded was real. 

Days where Alice was not well grew more and more frequent as the years passed. Though she did not have memories of the plague, it had left invisible scars on her. Their mother had been infected when she gave birth, which had spawned a different infection in Alice’s blood. Most days, she was everything a seven-year-old should be. Other days, she would wake up blind or unable to walk. When she was hurt, she bled blue. (A year ago, they had fallen out of a tree together, and Jervis had gotten some of Alice’s blood on a cut in his hand. The cut never healed right, and it always bled blue.)

Once, Jervis had asked his father why he saved people on the mainland instead of Alice. His father shook his head and left.

Now, they knew better. No one knew what was wrong with Alice, so no one could fix her. She would never have a normal life, but the island had denied her that anyway. Jervis and Alice weren’t yet old enough to think about the future, so this did not have quite the same effect as it would have on the mainland. 

As all days were much the same, it was a day like any other when Jervis went into the fields alone. 

“Alice! Shall we go back to the woods today?” He stood outside his sister’s door and called through the door. “I believe we were just in the middle of fighting the evil bird-creature when the rain started yesterday.”

“Not today. Everything looks fuzzy, like it’s very dark out. Is it dark out?”

Jervis looked down the hall to the window. Clouds hung thickly across the sky, giving the morning the appearance of dusk. “A bit. Should I come in?”

“If you like.”

Jervis slowly opened his sister’s door. Light from a dozen candles cast strange, flickering shadows about the room. Alice sat in her bed, still as a doll. Though she faced the door, her eyes were unfocused. She did not see him. Chunks of blond hair fell gracelessly where she had missed them while pulling her hair back. Despite noon approaching, she still wore her nightclothes and did not appear to have moved since the previous evening. 

“Are you going to read me a story today?” Alice’s eyes darted around the room, trying to find her brother. 

“Have you eaten today?” He asked instead, sitting carefully on the edge of her bed.

“No. Did I forget?” When she saw him next to her, she smiled. “There you are! It’s so hard to see you with the lights out like this.”

Jervis smiled sadly. “I’ll get Miss, she’ll get you some breakfast.”

“No story today, then?”

“I haven’t got one ready,” Jervis lied. He had spent countless hours reading, writing, and studying. He had a collection of stories, but none were suitable for today. The ones he had written weren’t good enough anymore, and the ones in the library didn’t feel right today. 

“Okay. Will you stay with me or will you go out?”

“Out. I’ll be back later, Alice. Try not to have too much fun while I’m gone,” he joked.

 

Jervis wandered out the door, barely remembering to grab a jacket as he left. Usually, he lived in his mind, in the worlds he found in the library or in the ever-expanding world he and Alice were creating for themselves. Today though, he couldn’t. He needed to be in his own reality, at least for a time. At least partly.

He wondered what it would be like to have friends. In all his books, the hero surrounded himself with people to talk with and adventure with. All in all, it seemed like the hero couldn’t survive without friends. But here Jervis was, and all he had was Alice, and that was okay. Wasn’t it?

Sometimes, in the stories, there would be pretty girls for the hero to talk to. There were certainly no pretty girls in his life, only Alice. Jervis wasn’t sure what he would do if there were pretty girls. Make a fool of himself, most likely. It was a good thing they weren’t there, then. 

Jervis looked up. Somehow, he was in the middle of a wheat field a half mile from the house. Miss must be up with Alice, or she never would have let him go this far on his own. He stretched his arms and spun in a circle, his unbuttoned coat catching the wind and filling behind him like a sail. The wheat rustled where his fingers knocked into the stalks, disturbing black birds who angrily flew to a calmer field. The clouds blocked most of the sunlight, its warmth barely able to combat the chill wind that blew around him.

In moments like this, where there was nothing but the sky above him and the field around him and the dirt beneath his shoes, Jervis almost seemed to disappear. He floated out of himself into the wind, where he didn’t have to think about how he didn’t have magic or friends or pretty girls, and he could just be.

Until he tripped over a large object that definitely was not supposed to be in a wheat field.

“What are you?” Jervis asked, unintentionally condescending. 

The object, which appeared to be a boy a bit younger than Jervis, lifted his head from where it had rested on his knees. The boy was naturally small, and he seemed to have folded himself into the smallest possible shape.

“Look where you’re going next time,” the boy spat before muttering a word Jervis had not heard before but that was unquestionably an insult. He dropped his head back onto his knees and curled his arms around it protectively. 

“Why are you here?”

“Father says I have to face my fears,” he said, his voice muffled.

“Well,” Jervis said, skeptically looking from the ragged boy to the idyllic surroundings and back, “what are you afraid of?”

The boy’s hair flopped in his eyes as he raised his head. “Most everything.” He laughed, short and self-deprecating, and looked at the ground. 

Jervis sat down a foot or two away from the boy. “What’s your name?” Maybe, he thought, this was how friends were made.

“What do you care?”

“Why wouldn’t I care?”

The question caught him off guard. He raised his eyebrows and looked Jervis in the eye. Jervis felt as though he was inspecting his soul. “Jonathan.” A pause. “Who are you? Haven’t seen you before.”

“I’m Jervis. I’m from over that way.” He waved his arm in the general direction of his house.

Jonathan arched an eyebrow even higher. “Town’s that way,” he said, pointing a finger in the opposite direction.

“Yeah.”

“All right, Jervis-from-nowhere, why are you here?”

“I wasn’t sure,” he said, cocking his head to the side, “but I think I’m helping you face your fears.”

“That’s not an answer,” Jonathan said, voice flat.

“That’s my answer,” Jervis replied, amused.

They sat for a minute in a silent face-off, Jervis grinning mischievously and Jonathan glaring. Finally, Jonathan lost the game of mental chicken. 

“Okay. How?”

“I’m not sure. What are you scared of, specifically?”

“Being around lots of people, spiders, dying, the scarecrow, the dark, thunderstorms…” The list seemed inexhaustible.

“Okay.” Jervis had no idea what he was supposed to do about all that, but he knew he had to do something, because that was what friends did. They helped each other. 

“That’s it? Okay?”

“Yeah. Everybody’s a bit afraid of something. Or lots of somethings.” 

“Father says fear is unnatural.”

“I think your father might be wrong.” After a few seconds of comfortable silence, Jervis asked “Do you want to play tag?”

Jonathan pushed him over and jumped up, surprisingly fast for how small and thin he looked. “You’re it!” He shouted, laughing.

 

The next day, when Jervis told Alice about his new friend, she smiled. “Can I meet him?” She asked, a trickle of blue blood running from her nose.

“Absolutely.”

When they returned to the wheat field, almost a week later, Jonathan was not there. Jervis didn’t know why he had expected him to be, except that he didn’t know how else he would find him again. 

“I don’t see him anywhere,” Jervis said, turning his head exaggeratedly to pantomime looking from side to side. “Do you?”

Alice played along, laughing. “Nope!”

“Dryads can sometimes be tricky like that,” Jervis said knowingly. 

“You never said he was a dryad!” Alice crossed her arms.

He pretended to think for a moment. “I didn’t? Well, it must have slipped my mind. Shall we be off? I think the fairy queen asked you over for tea.”

As Alice sat on a stump near the edge of the woods, stirring leaves into a cup of dirty water to make “tea,” Jervis wondered how much of their game she believed. Sometimes, to him, it felt more real than life.

 

“Did you make up a friend for yourself?” Alice asked later that afternoon, when the game was over and they headed home. 

“No. He was real.”

“Am I not enough?”

“You’re more than enough, Alice,” he said, reaching down to take her hand. He would do anything to keep her safe, but most of the time he could barely keep his own feet on the ground.

 

_Lightning crackled in the dark clouds. A cold wind ripped through Jonathan’s ragged, patched coat like needles of ice. He stood in the center of the wheat field, and he knew it was coming._

_All around him, the gold stalks turned dirt brown as the roiling clouds blocked out what little light had existed. He could hear a rustling as something ran through the field, circling him, coming ever closer. The wind picked up, growing louder and louder and colder and colder.  
In the distance, where he knew the village hid, a column of the clouds reached out to the ground. Spinning with the wind, it snaked ever closer, ripping apart the buildings, then the trees, then the crops. And in the middle of the wave of destruction, he could see its outline, flying victorious._

_Desperately, he squeezed his eyes shut, but he couldn’t keep them closed. He didn’t want to see it, it was always the same but it was always watching and if he saw it then it would see him and then he would never be safe. Lightning shot to the ground deep inside the tornado, lighting the clouds green. It stood out in stark contrast, a black and gray and brown horror with straw poking out the sides. Long, sharp fingers reached out, gleaming silver where they broke through the clouds. The end of a crooked hat, patched in every color of dust, writhed in the air. When everything went black, Jonathan could still feel the deathly weight of its eyes and the hunger of its stitched-together lips._

 

Jervis awoke with a distinct feeling of unease. Something was wrong today, but his head wasn’t working fast enough to think why.

“Daddy!” He heard Alice yell from the floor below.

He groaned and flopped face-first onto his pillow. Days when his father visited were the worst. These were days when they all pretended that they were a happy family, that their father hadn’t abandoned them on this island.

It didn’t work. All morning, Alice chattered away in a way she never would have normally done in answer to their father’s noticeably uninterested questions. Neither of them could remember a life with their parents, so this whole charade seemed pointless to him. Bringing new books, clothes, and lessons every few months did not make up for leaving them.

“Alice, I got something special for you this time,” their father said. He reached into the inside pocket of his coat and pulled out a small book. Gold letters spelled out the title, _Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland_ , over a red cover. “Look! This little girl is Alice too, and she has spectacular adventures.”

“I have spectacular adventures with Jervis too,” Alice said solemnly.

“I’m sure you do, sweetheart,” their father said. Jervis thought he caught a hint of condescension in his words.

“Did you get anything special for Jervis?” Alice asked.

Their father’s face froze for a second before re-settling into fake happiness. “Of course! Your brother is going to learn to shoot.” He turned to face Jervis. “Every gentleman knows how to hunt.”

Jervis wanted to ask if he was a gentleman, really, because he didn’t feel like one. He was quite sure his father wasn’t a gentleman. Instead, he smiled and nodded along, just as his father wanted him to.

That afternoon, his father took him out into the field and placed a glass bottle on a fence. When Jervis finally hit it, after a long lesson on firearms and aim, he felt a swelling happiness. This was something he could do, something that the heroes of his stories could do also. He knew it wasn’t a skill he would ever use, but it was a skill nonetheless. He could teach Alice, who was supposed to be at home reading her book but who had snuck along with them anyway, in a couple years. 

When their father left, Jervis saw a ring sparkling on his left hand that he had never seen before. In that moment, he knew that today had been meant as a farewell. That he was never coming back. And he wasn’t sure if he cared.

 

“Why is a raven like a writing desk?” Jervis read. He was growing more and more sure that his father had not bothered to read the book before giving it to Alice. This colorful madness did not seem anything like the drab morality tales he had always favored.  
Alice, who had hooked her knees over a tree branch and was hanging upside-down, did not know. “They’re not alike at all!” She laughed, absently brushing the grass beneath her with her fingers.

“No, they’re not,” Jervis smiled, “but maybe in Wonderland they are.”

“I should like to visit Wonderland then,” a new voice said from a few feet away. “It sounds like miracles could happen there.”

“Miracles can happen anywhere,” Alice said, spinning around so that she perched on top of the branch. “Who are you?”

His eyes flickered nervously between Jervis and Alice. Jonathan looked just as ragged as before, and something haunted lurked in his eyes. Jervis got the distinct impression that it had taken quite a lot for him to join them. 

“This is Jonathan. And this is my sister Alice.”

“Nice to meet you,” Jonathan said just as Alice blurted “I didn’t think you were real.”

“Why wouldn’t I be real?”

“Usually Jervis’s stories aren’t true.”

“Hey!”

Jonathan laughed self-consciously.

“We’re reading _Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland_ ,” Jervis explained. “Would you like to join us?”

“Can I?”

“It’s a whole book all about me!” Alice added.

“Of course you can. You can stay with us any time.”

Alice raised an eyebrow. “Go back to reading,” She commanded.

“Yes, your majesty,” Jervis smiled.

As he read, Alice curled up in her tree and listened. Jonathan pulled out a pad of paper and leaned against the tree trunk, drawing. By the end of the chapter, Alice had flipped herself upside down again to watch him.

“Is that me?”

“It’s nothing. Just a sketch.”

Jervis leaned over to look. He hadn’t seen much art in his life, except the stiff-looking portraits on the walls of the house. This was filled with a mad kind of energy. Three figures and a small mouse sat around a tea-table. One was Alice, one was a large rabbit, and one wore a huge hat.

“It’s definitely me,” Alice decided. “And that one looks like Jervis.” She pointed to the one in the hat.

Jervis handed Alice the book. “We both look far better in Jonathan’s art than we do here,” he smiled. 

Alice and Jonathan looked at the weasel-faced Hatter illustration and laughed. 

“I’m done reading for today,” Alice decided. “Would you like to have lunch with us?” 

Jonathan nodded.

Alice climbed down from the tree and began to walk toward the house. Jonathan and Jervis quietly trailed just behind her, content.

 

***

 

_Jonathan frantically looked for a place to hide, but there were no convenient corners. No walls, no tables to duck under. He was alone in the field, thick black clouds gathering overhead and amber stalks swirling around him._

_It towered before him, its lifeless head lolling on its chest, arms flopping uselessly. It was dead, but Jonathan knew it was never truly dead. Maybe this one was a trick, and the real monster hid just out of sight. He would never know until it was too late. But it wanted to scare him, and Jonathan knew that it considered a quick death, a surprise attack, too good for him. Fear was unnatural, his father said, and he must be right because there was nothing natural about this being of pure terror._

_He glanced over his shoulder, left, right, left, right. It was here, it was right next to him, it was –_

_Lightning forked through the clouds above him as something flickered to life in its eyes. Breaking free of the posts that had held it up, it snapped its twine ties one by one. It grew and grew until its long, ragged hat nearly touched the clouds. Thunder crashed and the clouds gave out, dumping rain so thick Jonathan could barely see. Still it laughed, the torrent darkening its burlap clothes and obscuring its face. All but the eyes, which still glowed with an unearthly light. Another bolt of lightning snaked down next to Jonathan. The last thing he saw as the electricity coursed through him and his vision turned white was a menacing grin as its steel claws swung towards him._


	2. Chapter 2

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Definition of grow up. intransitive verb. 1 a. : to grow toward or arrive at full stature or physical or mental maturity : to progress from childhood toward adulthood. growing up intellectually. 
> 
> In which Jon falls down the rabbit hole and Jervis goes tumbling after.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Again, warnings for major (canonical) character death, mentions of needles, and mentions of drug abuse (kind of? it's fear toxin so). If I've forgotten any other warnings, please tell me and I'll add them here. As with last chapter, if anyone feels I handled Alice's illness insensitively, let me know. There are a couple scenes where Jervis takes Alice's pulse, and while I'm not sure that's medically correct (how a professional would do it) that is how I take my pulse and I stand by it. I'm aware everyone is really ooc but I think i only made one major change (re: them being decent people) and tried to keep it accurate from there. Finally: enjoy the chapter!

Time was a funny thing on the island. Some days flashed past in the blink of an eye while some hours took years. Without realizing it, Jervis, Alice, and Jonathan grew up in this lazy, inconsistent river of time. 

Two or three years ago, the housekeeper left. She had been offered a position on the mainland, in a house without the strangeness and constant isolation of the Tetches. Their father had never sent a replacement. Instead, Jervis was left to care for himself, Alice, and the house. Aside from Jon, they were truly alone. Jervis didn’t mind. He didn’t mind about most things, because in order to care about the way something was done, he had to have an opinion. Learning to cook, taking care of Alice on her increasingly frequent bad days, and ensuring both of them got an education was difficult, but it was what he was used to.

His father still sent a package every three months or so. When the ship came in, some unfortunate soul would be forced to run the two miles to the Tetch house to announce the arrival of a box, which Jervis would trek out and drag back. Though the contents differed each time, they were similar enough for Jervis to assume that his father had paid someone to pack the trunks for him. Each one contained books, both educational and entertaining, money for food, a list of things they should have learned in their schooling, some minor trinket popular in the city, and once a year, new clothes. The clothes never fit, as their father had clearly expected his children to grow tall, so Jervis had asked the tailor in the village to teach him to alter them.

Mirrors lurked in inopportune places in the Tetch house. Some were where you’d expect them to be, but others hid just around the corners of halls or just too above the fireplace to be visible. To them, their faces remained the same as they always had. But sometimes, Alice would pull out an old dress to find it was fit for a child several years her younger, or Jervis would find a pair of shoes now smaller than his feet. Jon always looked much the same. Jervis often got the impression that he simply added new patches to his clothes when they grew too small to avoid ordering new ones.

Jon didn’t come to the Tetch house every day. He worked with his father, managing their field in the mornings and teaching the few children of the village in the afternoons. When Jervis came to town, much more often now that he had to buy food, he would meet Jon to lend him a book or just to say hello. When Jon wasn’t required to be at his father’s small school, he would start the walk through the fields. He was over at least three times a week, but usually more. Jervis got the distinct impression the other kids in town, such as they were, disliked him for some reason.

Time was weird on the island, but it seemed to move normally when Jon was around. Without him, days passed in a semi-mindless haze of cleaning, fixing, helping, and always, always daydreaming. When he was there, Jervis felt he truly lived. He still escaped into his books, but he was always aware of Jon sitting in the chair next to him, equally absorbed in learning as much as he could from Jervis’s library. He didn’t feel the need to let his mind wander as far while doing simple tasks when he had someone else there.  
Jon still drew. Jervis hadn’t seen much art except the illustrations in the library, but he thought Jon’s art was beautiful. Once, Jon had tried to throw away the drawing he had given Alice when they were children, of her taking tea with Jervis the Hatter and the March Hare. He insisted that it was old and embarrassing. 

“You might not think it’s good anymore, but I certainly do, so you can shut it,” Alice had told him. “Anyway, it’s a memory of the day we first met and that you most certainly cannot just throw that away.”

Watching Alice, who was still a bit shorter than Jervis, who was himself a good deal shorter than Jon, win the argument so easily had been entertaining. Alice might be small, but she was a force to be reckoned with. Though days where she could not get out of bed came more and more frequently, they didn’t deter her. She argued with everything she had and taught herself how to shoot better than Jervis could ever hope to.

Jon drew Alice a lot. She was dynamic, he said. He drew her standing in the fields under the stars, twirling alone in the unused ballroom of the manor, and of course in Wonderland. Sometimes he drew Jervis, usually engrossed in a book or hard at work. Unless he specifically showed them a drawing, Jervis and Alice were not allowed to look. They never had. Once, the wind had blown one of the books open to a different page when Jon had been drawing Alice. Jervis hadn’t meant to look, but what he saw was fascinating. It was a simple sketch of a scarecrow from the cornfield a mile or so away, but something about its angry, dark lines made the picture seem to be a portrait of fear itself. Jervis hadn’t said anything and never looked again, though he desperately wanted to.

Jon kept his sketchbooks and tools at their house, for fear that his father might find them and demand to know why he used his spare time and money for something so useless. 

“It’s not useless,” they had both told him, countless times.

“It doesn’t matter,” he always said. “Even if it’s not, it’s still not running a farm or teaching or curing cancer or whatever he wants me to do.”

 

A few months later, the three of them had dragged all the blankets from the closet into the backyard to watch a meteor shower. Alice had fallen asleep curled up with the biggest blanket as the moon was still rising over the trees. Jon and Jervis lay side by side and watched the sky in silence. When the shower started, Jon pushed Alice’s shoulder to wake her up. She punched his arm and rolled over. 

“Alice, look,” Jervis whispered. “The stars are falling.”

This time, she stayed awake.

“It’s beautiful,” Jervis breathed as the last meteor streaked across the sky. Alice had long since fallen back asleep, and his eyelids were starting to feel heavy.

“I would draw it if I could,” Jon replied.

“You can.”

“Maybe.” Jon paused for several minutes, long enough for Jervis to fall into a state of hazy half-sleep. “I’ve always thought I was afraid of so many things, but I don’t think I am. I think what I’m afraid of is being a disappointment, and most everything else is because of that.”

“You aren’t a disappointment,” Jervis mumbled.

The night hid Jon’s sad smile, the one that said he didn’t agree.

“You’re the best friend I could ask for. You’re smart and incredibly talented and if your dad can’t see that, then that’s his loss.” Jervis took his hand and squeezed it. Jon had never understood or required hugging for reassurance like Alice did, but they’d found that hand-holding worked much the same way. It helped him reel in his mind when he got too lost in his own negativity. 

Exhaustion claimed them soon after, still holding hands.

 

In the beginning of fall, Jon took them out to the wheat field where he had first met Jervis. It had been almost ten years since then, and the wheat was once again almost ready for harvest. The day was hot, though not oppressively so, and there was no wind to speak of.

“Jon, why are we here?” Alice asked, confused and ever curious. Jervis said nothing. Something was wrong here, and he trusted Jon would explain.

For a long moment, Jon was silent too. It was different from his usual silences. Jon was always quiet, but it was usually the kind of quiet that meant words weren’t necessary, the peaceful quiet of reading a familiar book. Now, he needed words and they had failed him.  
He straightened his shoulders slightly in what Jervis knew was forced bravery. He wasn’t sure why Jon needed to be brave here, at the front of an empty field just like every other on their island, but in the end it didn’t matter. What mattered was that this, whatever this was, was something big. 

Somewhere in the back of Jervis’s mind, a small voice whispered that Jon shouldn’t have kept secrets from him, that this was a sign he didn’t trust him, that he didn’t matter to him. Jervis ignored it and hooked his pinkie around Jon’s in a quiet show of support and defiance.

“Jon?” Alice asked again, gently.

“We haven’t been here before.” Every word was heavy, dead. “Did you ever wonder why?”

Alice shook her head.

“We have.” Jervis tilted his head to the side, hair falling in his eyes. “The first time we met.”

“You remember?”

Jervis nodded. He wasn’t going to explain the way time sped up when Jon was gone, the way he would spend hours on tasks he couldn’t remember doing and sometimes catch himself doing the same chores twice because all he remembered from the first time was his daydream. Jon had somehow become his anchor to reality, and he remembered everything with him in it.

Alice narrowed her eyes at Jervis, confusion still present under a thick layer of judgement.

“Do you remember what I told you I was doing here?” Jon still sounded detached, but now Jervis heard hints of his teacher voice, the voice he had often heard him use when helping Alice with a particularly difficult problem. Alice had always hated this voice.

“Facing your fear.” 

“That’s why we’re here now.”

And Jervis still didn’t understand, but he thought he might be starting to. 

“Jon,” Alice asked slowly, “What is in that field?” 

“I never did face my fear that day. I had never meant to, and then I found a distraction. I found you, Jervis, and we could run fast enough that the fear didn’t catch up to me. But it will. And I need you to help me before it can.” Jon dropped Jervis’s hand and walked into the field, the golden-brown wheat rustling then falling still. He had all but disappeared.

“Well?” Alice asked Jervis before following Jon. Jervis pushed down a shard of hurt at being referred to as a distraction as he, too, disappeared into the field.

Time stopped as he stepped off the path. Moving became more difficult with every step. The air around him seemed to thicken and become charged, the way the world feels seconds before a storm breaks. Every direction was pure, unbroken amber. Distantly, Jervis knew that if he took a wrong turn, he could wander this field forever and never leave. No sooner had he realized this than he found himself in a small clearing.

A cross of sticks stood defiant in the center, stark against the sky. From it hung a limp figure, wrists dangling from their supports, loosely tied with loops of coarse twine. Its clothes were ragged and torn, straw poking from every hole. A hat that used to be tall and pointed before falling victim to seasons of wind and rain shadowed the vacantly smiling burlap face.

Jon stood in front of it, Alice by his side. All of his carefully constructed bravery and detachment had fallen away, and he hovered near the edge of the clearing. His right hand twisted the hem of his shirt almost unconsciously.

“You brought us here for a scarecrow?” Alice asked, confusion and fear warring in her. Fear of Jon or fear for Jon. It didn’t matter which.

“Demons wear many faces,” said Jervis idly. Alice raised her eyebrows.

“It’s not the scarecrow that I’m afraid of.” Jon paused, eyes flickering over the scarecrow. “Or, it is, but …”

And Jervis waited, and Alice waited, and the scarecrow waited too.

“It’s less, in the daytime,” Jon said carefully. “Powerless.”

Jervis didn’t think the scarecrow looked powerless at all. In fact, it felt a bit too alive. It was fascinating.

“When I was little, I used to think it was just creepy. Hanging there dead. I used to wonder why they wanted a dead man in the field after all the death in town,” Jon whispered.

“I don’t remember when I started giving it my secrets. It was easy, talking without really talking. I could give the scarecrow the secrets and doubts and fears I could never give to my father. And I thought I was safe.

“When I was seven, everything changed. The scarecrow wasn’t a dead man anymore. It had become everything I had ever given it. When I came here, it would stare right through me as if it could see my soul. I stopped coming. I haven’t been here since.

“But in the end, it didn’t matter. I’m here when I sleep, and every night it’s getting closer. I don’t know if I can hide anymore. Or if I should. And I don’t know what I’m going to do when everything I’ve never wanted to face catches up with me.”

Jervis kept silent a while, considering. He’d always known Jon was running from his family, from the town, but he’d never known he was running from himself. He should’ve known.

“You’ll face it,” Alice told him. “You’ll face it and you’ll win.”

“I don’t think I’m strong enough.”

“You are,” she promised.

 

Jervis had often read that a bloodhound, when it caught the scent of its target, was nearly unstoppable. In the weeks after he had brought them to the scarecrow, Jon became more and more like one. In the last ten years, none of them had ever truly had a purpose, but now, Jervis thought, Jon might have found his.

He came to the house less frequently, and at random times. Whenever he did come, he practically locked himself in the library and often would not emerge for hours. His pencils lay untouched in their drawer gathering dust. His mind seemed further away too. Whatever he was working on had completely captured his attention. Whenever Jervis or Alice spoke to him, he was so lost in thought that he did not hear them until the third or fourth repetition of their question. Eventually, Alice stopped trying.

“He’ll get over it, one of these days,” she told Jervis. “And until he does, talking to him is about as much use as talking to a wall.” When Jervis had merely shrugged, she continued “I know you miss him. I do too. But if he doesn’t want to talk to us, there’s not much we can do.”

Jervis wasn’t sure that Jon didn’t want to talk to them. He thought Jon just forgot that life went on outside of whatever he was hunting. So while he no longer attempted to interrupt Jon’s work, even when he pored over a book long enough to miss meals, Jervis still made an effort to be in the library when Jon was over. If he played chess with Alice, he did it in the library. If he was mending a hole in his jacket, he did it in the library.

This was, Jervis knew, a strange thing to do. Alice made this clear with raised eyebrows and sideways glances. Somewhere in the back of Jervis’s mind, he couldn’t let go of the hope that one of these days Jon would look up from his books and remember his friends. Remember him. 

When that day did come, it was both nothing like Jervis expected and the only possible outcome of the situation.

Jon excitedly scribbled something in a notebook and slammed the book in front of him shut. Two more still lay open on the table in front of them, scraps of paper sticking out to mark various pages.

“I’m going to do it, Jervis,” Jon whispered excitedly. “I’m going to end fear.”

Jervis was skeptical. He was not often afraid, as he felt that a large part of fear formed from a deep connection to one’s body, specifically the wish not to see it harmed. As his own soul hovered only close enough to his body to use his eyes, Jervis had never formed this type of connection.

“Why?” He knew why, but he was not sure he understood.

“Because,” Jon said, grabbing another book off the table. “Fear is unnatural. Think what I could do if I did not fear disappointing my father. If I were not afraid of failure.”

Privately, Jervis thought that what Jon was doing now was a very good example of just such a scenario.

“Fear is holding me back. I could finally be someone,” he ranted, eyes ablaze in a way Jervis had never seen them. 

If Alice were here, she would say something reassuring. “You already are someone,” perhaps. She would be correct, of course. She so often was. 

Jervis did not say that. He did think Jon was someone; he believed that far more than he believed that he himself was someone. However, he also thought that the fire in Jon’s eyes was far more interesting than it had any right to be, and he would not try to put it out just yet. Instead, he asked “How will you do it?”

The corner of Jon’s mouth twitched up in a self-satisfied smile. “I’m going to make a vaccine.” He dumped four large books into a bag, which he slung over his shoulder. “I’m going to distill the very essence of fear, so that exposure creates an immunity to the feeling. I can make myself fearless, Jervis. I can make everyone fearless.”

This was, Jervis thought, not quite how science worked. He was fairly certain that there was a difference between polio and fear, and that one could be vaccinated while the other could not. But he had always been more interested in fairy tales than science, and if there was anyone who could do it, it would be Jon. He was, Jervis thought proudly, a bit brilliant.

“And you can do that?” He asked.

“Now I can,” Jon said, patting the bag. “This is going to be a breakthrough, Jervis,” he called as he rushed out of the room. “The biggest discovery of the century!”

“Where are you going?” Jervis called after him. There was no response.

 

Now that Jon didn’t need to use the library anymore, he came by even less often. In the two weeks since what Jon regarded as his breakthrough, Jervis had seen him three times. Each time, the bags under his eyes were deeper and he seemed to have grown paler. Jervis considered asking if he was okay, but he knew that even if Jon wasn’t okay, he wouldn’t admit it. So he and Alice pretended nothing was wrong, even if neither of them believed it.

Jervis watched the clouds roll in, thick black sheets hanging low over the island. This was the first true thunderstorm since whatever breakthrough Jon had had in the library. It was not the first time it had rained, though the rain had come with less and less frequency as winter approached. But this was the first time he could feel his ears pop with the pressure, see the clouds flicker a greenish gray with lightning as they blotted out the horizon.

Alice and he piled blankets and pillows under the largest window in the attic, making a nest they both knew they were too old for. Neither of them cared. Ever since they could remember, they had camped out under this window to watch thunderstorms, the lightning crackling through the air and distorting behind the sheets of rain. 

Usually, Jon joined them. He did not enjoy storms the same way Alice and Jervis did; something about the loud crash of thunder too near the house did not sit well with him. Still, he burrowed under the blankets and slept. Jervis had once asked him why he stayed with them, and Jon had just shrugged. “It’s safer here,” he had said, though this was not strictly true.

Even though he knew he wasn’t coming, Jervis kept glancing at the door. When a tree scraped against a window, he reminded himself it wasn’t the noise of the door opening downstairs. The wind whipping and curling around the old house was not the creak of the stairs. 

“Just go talk to him,” Alice said.

Jervis pointed to the window. Sheets of rain fell so thick the fence at the edge of the yard blurred into obscurity.

“Tomorrow.”

“Will you come as well?”

“No. This is a you problem.” Alice smiled, and as the shadows flickered across her face, she looked almost sad. “And besides, I think I might be staying here tomorrow.”

Jervis motioned to their pile of blankets and pillows. “Here?” 

Alice nodded. A flash of lightning, near enough that the resulting crack of thunder was almost instantaneous, illuminated her face in its pale, watery light. Suddenly, she looked like exactly what, Jervis supposed, she truly was. A very sick girl, barely older than a child.

He took her wrist in his hand and counted the beats while she counted off the seconds. One, two, three, four, five, six.

“Thirteen,” he said. Their eyes met, and he could see her push down the fear he knew was written all over his face.

“It feels different, recently,” she confessed. “I can feel it in my veins, everywhere it goes. Sometimes it’s warm. Sometimes I feel like I have ice inside me.”

Jervis didn’t know what to say, so he didn’t say anything. They knelt there, among the blankets, rain steadily pounding on the roof, for a long moment. He did not drop her wrist, even when she settled against him and laid her head in his lap. He was sure he could feel the river of burning cold just under her skin.

After a while, Jervis spoke. “Everything feels like it’s ending.” 

“How?” Alice asked, her voice almost a whisper.

“With Jon gone, and with you getting worse. And I don’t know how to help.” Even now, Jervis half expected Alice to say she was fine, nothing was wrong, because nothing had ever really been fine but she had soldiered on anyway. But she said nothing. “It’s like this part has all just been the prologue, and chapter one is about to start. Or like in Jane Eyre, and all this time on our island is the time before she leaves her school.”

“Are you off to find yourself a Rochester?” Alice teased, and they both laughed.

“I only picked that book because I know you read it!” Jervis sputtered halfheartedly.

Alice kept laughing. “Yeah right. You used to read it all the time.”

“I don’t want things to end here,” Jervis suddenly grew serious again. “I would stay here forever.”

“Forever is a long time, brother.” Alice’s hair reflected what little light penetrated the storm, forming a soft halo around her face. “And there’s nothing you would change?”

“I would heal you,” he said, “and have Jon here like before.”

“If you could have anything in the world?” Alice asked.

“That’s all I want.” Jervis sighed. And it was, he realized. He used to want so much. When had that stopped? “What would you wish for?”

“I would see the world. Go everywhere, do everything.”

“We can do that, if you want. I can sell the house and we’ll go all through England and France, and in the summer we can go south and see Italy, and from there—”

Alice brought her other hand over to cover Jervis’s, still lightly holding her wrist. “There isn’t going to be a next summer,” she said, looking him directly in the eyes.

Jervis was speechless. “How—” How can you just say that? How can you give up so easily? How do you know? “There will be. There always is,” he muttered, more to himself than Alice.

“I hope so,” Alice whispered to herself.

They lay there, thunder jolting them awake every time they drifted close to sleep, until eventually, it too became background noise. Soon enough, tangled in the heap of blankets and with his sister curled up beside him, Jervis fell asleep.

 

The next morning, Jervis awoke to the sun shining softly through the window and a vague sense of unease. He wasn’t sure how, but he knew that Jon had been out last night, and that he hadn’t made it to the manor. He slowly started to extract himself from the blankets, most of which seemed to have been thrown on top of him after he fell asleep.

“Stop worrying!” Alice mumbled into her pillow while whacking him in the leg with one laying nearby. She somehow had only part of one blanket, which did not even attempt to cover her legs. She must be cold.

“I didn’t say anything!” He protested.

“You didn’t have to,” she said, lifting her head from the pillow so that she could glare at him. Alice had never been good at effectively glaring at Jervis (though she could usually intimidate Jon), and she was even less effective with pillow creases on one side of her face. “I can just tell. You’re worrying about him again.”

“Of course I am,” Jervis said, beginning to fold blankets Alice wouldn’t need. “He’s my best friend.”

“He’s my best friend too,” she reminded him.

Jervis attempted to change the subject. “Are you sure you’ll be staying here today? You don’t even want to go downstairs?”

“It makes a nice change. Different view. Anyway, I was saying.” Alice ignored Jervis’s dismayed sigh. “You act like you can read his mind or something.”

“Or something.” He found it was hard to argue with her. Not only because she was right, but because he had just woken up and his brain still hadn’t unfogged all the way. Also, all his hair was flipped to the left side of his head, and it was distracting.

“You have to think about yourself sometimes, too,” Alice reminded him. 

I know, Jervis wanted to say. But as soon as I think about myself I realize how lost I am.

Instead, he said “Yeah.”

“You don’t even need to leave the island to find your Rochester. He’s been right here all along.”

“Jon is not my Rochester,” Jervis said, affronted. “I’m not looking for a Rochester.”

Alice raised an eyebrow. Despite the fact that she was still laying on the floor, her judgement came across crystal clear. “Tall, not overly handsome, unknown comings and goings, mysterious motives… Really Jervis, I think he sounds just like him.”

“Can I get you some breakfast before I go out.” Jervis asked, monotone.

“Yes, thank you.” Alice flopped back down onto her pillow. “ _Boys_ ,” she muttered as he left the room.

Jervis wandered through the fields. In the back of his mind, a voice that sounded an awful lot like Alice told him that he had no way of knowing that Jon was anywhere but safe in his own home, that he was being overprotective and that he should go. He resolutely ignored it.

“Something’s wrong,” he muttered out loud. There was no one to hear him.

Finding Jon wasn’t his only problem. It didn’t even come close. But it was the only thing he could fix. For years and years, he had worked to make the best life he could for Alice. But now, all of that didn’t even matter. She was going to die, and there was nothing he could do about it.

It did matter, he insisted. It does.

A cold wind hit his face, the first hint of winter. He didn’t notice. The leaves had fallen off the old tree in the yard and been blown away by last night’s storm. Every so often he stepped on a crumpled patch of red or orange. He didn’t notice that either. In fact, he was so lost in his head that he likely would not have noticed if he ran into Jon just the way he had seven years ago.

He had always thought he’d made his peace with Alice dying. After all, there had never been a time in his life when Alice wasn’t dying. Instead, he realized, he had assumed that Alice would be dying forever, but she would never actually do it. Life had been him and Jon and Alice for so long that he didn’t know who he was without the other two.

Jon knew who he was. That’s why he wasn’t around anymore. Because he was finally doing what he was meant to do. Jervis was a bit jealous of Jon, of how sure of himself he was. And somewhere in the back of his mind, he knew he was jealous of how easy it had been for Jon to leave them behind.

Alice certainly didn’t seem scared Jon had left them forever. Or maybe she was scared, but she was just better at putting on a brave face. Of course, she had been putting on a brave face her whole life, Jervis reminded himself. Because she was dying.  
Jervis shook his head to snap himself out of it. It only partially worked. 

Looking around, he realized that he was standing in front of the wheat field. Directly in front of him, the scarecrow loomed over the clearing. Now that the harvest had passed, the dead stalks of the summer’s crop barely blocked the figure from his sight.  
As he pushed through the sharp, blackened field that looked to have been more burned than harvested, Jervis thought about the joke Alice had made this morning about him and Jon. Jervis had always read everything he could get his hands on, and while he was partial to fairy tales and other fantastical stories, it was true that, as a kid, he’d had a soft spot for romances. He wasn’t sure when that had stopped, just like he didn’t know when he stopped wanting to be the hero of a book, complete with the adventures and a pretty girl waiting for him. All he knew was that one day, he woke up and realized that he would much rather have Alice and Jon than any adventures or girls in the world.  
Still, he didn’t know where Alice got that particular idea from.

That train of thought vanished as soon as Jervis reached the clearing with the scarecrow. Somehow, he’d known he would find Jon here, but seeing him like this…

Jon lay curled up at the base of the scarecrow, arms pulled into his threadbare sleeves to keep warm. He was so thin Jervis could see each vertebra on his back through his shirt, which he had pulled around himself. His eyes were closed, and he was shaking.

“Jon?” Jervis whispered.

The only response was a more violent shiver.

“What happened to you?”

For a split second, Jon opened his eyes. They were blank, nothing behind them but pure, unfocused terror.

When his eyes had closed again, Jervis took off his coat and laid it over Jon. He picked him up, unbalanced from how light he was. Slowly, Jervis carried Jon, still twitching despite the warmth beginning to return to his limbs, back to the house.

 

_Jonathan stood in the field. It was always the same field, always the same swirling stalks of grain rustling about him no matter the season. The same thick, black clouds rumbled over him, the same biting wind tore through his thin, patched coat. He stared at the ground, determined not to watch as the monster made its way towards him._

_He expected to curl in on himself, to block out the horror clawing its way across the landscape. Every night, it drew closer. Jonathan had never been religious, but he prayed it would never reach him. Instead, as the first heavy drops of rain hit his face he found himself flying. Slowly, then faster and faster, he rose until he towered over the field. The rain fell harder and harder, mixing with the wind to send droplets whipping through the air. They soaked through his clothes and he could feel them slowly dripping from his hair, and yet he was unafraid._

_Running through the wheat below, Jonathan saw his father. He scurried beneath the harvest-heavy stalks, head snapping back and forth, back and forth. Like a mouse, Jonathan thought. Was he looking for him? Had he finally wondered where his son had gone, had been dragged to every night? He reached out to touch his father, to reassure him, and that was when he saw his hands. Huge, covered in gloves that showed only straw through their many holes. Each finger sharpened into a long metal syringe filled with a sickly green liquid. He did not have to look to know the rest of his body would be the same. He could feel the long, tall hat perch on his head. His cloth face stretched as he laughed, long and loud._

_His father wasn’t afraid for him. He never had been. He was afraid of him. For Jonathan had become the Scarecrow that had always haunted him. From where he stood in the midst of the storm, lightning crashing around him, Jonathan understood. He no longer needed to be afraid. He would make others fear him._

 

The blind panic didn’t fade from Jon’s eyes until late that afternoon. Jervis put him in his bed, intending to stay until he warmed up enough to stop shaking. As the minutes passed, instead of abating, Jon only shook more. He tossed and turned on the mattress, restless. When he woke up, he stared at nothing with the same pure terror. Desperately, he pressed himself into a ball against the headboard, whimpering.

During the first of these, Jervis had reached out a hand. “It’s okay, Jon, I’m here, it’s okay,” he whispered. The moment his hand touched Jon’s, Jon looked at him without recognition and tried to scream. His voice cracked, and no sound came out. How long had he been screaming last night in the storm, with no one to hear him? Jervis pulled his feet up on his chair, hugged his knees, and waited. 

The light had started to dim when Jon stopped shaking and fell asleep, the blankets pulled as close as possible to his chest. Jervis rested a hand on Jon’s forehead to check for fever. Satisfied, he filled up the glass of water on the bedside table and left, leaving the door slightly open.

 

The attic door creaked as Jervis inched it open. He winced, not moving out of the doorway.

“Did you find him?” Alice looked up from a book.

Jervis nodded.

“And he’s okay?”

Jon wasn’t okay, not by a long shot. But how could he tell Alice that? 

“He’s fine.” Jervis sat down in the blankets near Alice, moving with a deliberate slowness. There was only so much worrying he could take. The Jon and Alice situations were pulling him apart and his mind begged to fly away into the story worlds where he had always sought refuge, but he knew that was no longer possible.

Alice set down her book. “I take it he’s not coming back.” 

“He might.”

She wrapped an arm around his shoulders, pulling him into a sideways hug, a support that Jervis gladly fell into. “I’m sorry.”

“He might,” Jervis whispered.

 

Late that afternoon, Jervis sat on a low branch of the tree in the backyard, leaning against the trunk with a blanket pulled over him. He wasn’t really sure why he chose to sit in the tree; it wasn’t the warmest of places, especially not this late in fall. Unwilling to go back inside, he ignored the cold and let his mind go.

It wasn’t often that he got the chance to do this, to lose himself in the way he had when they were younger. Now, no matter how he hated it, he had to stay in the present, in his body, even when he looked in the mirror and didn’t know, for a moment, whose reflection he was seeing. It was too much responsibility, but he had managed. Somehow.

Before he had come outside, he had helped Alice move everything back to her room. Or, more accurately, he had stood by while she did everything herself and refused to let him carry anything. He was never quite sure where the line between reasonably helping and being overly helpful and thereby condescending to her illness lay, but with years of practice, he usually managed to stay on the right side of it. Once she was settled and the extra blankets and pillows were properly put away, he checked in on Jon. He was still sleeping; he had not entirely recovered from whatever he had done to himself. 

Jervis wasn’t quite sure what growing up entailed exactly, but he thought he had reached the age where he should, by all rights, be an adult. Sometimes he felt he was, but more often he felt like a kid out of his depth. In all the books he’d read when he was younger, people his age were going on adventures, getting married, and starting their own families. Nothing felt further from his reality. He had his family, and it was a sister he couldn’t save and a best friend he was watching grow away from him.

Below him, the back door creaked open and Jon stepped out. 

“Leaving again, then?” Jervis called.

Jon didn’t look fazed to see Jervis sitting in a tree. “I can’t stay.”

“Why can’t you?”

“Work to do.” Jon looked straight ahead as he spoke, avoiding the tree were Jervis sat.

Jervis knew he was being petty and selfish, but that didn’t stop him from saying “That’s never stopped you before.” He regretted it as soon as he said it. Jon’s work now was giving him a purpose, and he would never deny him that. But it was killing him. Somehow it ended with him alone and terrified, and Jervis wanted to understand. But above all, he wanted his best friend back.

“That was my father’s work.” Jon looked up at Jervis. “This is mine. This is what I want.”

“I know.”

“I’m not leaving because of you. You and Alice,” he trailed off for a second, “you’re the most important people in the world to me. But this is something I need to do. And I won’t be gone forever.”

“Won’t you?” Jon opened his mouth to protest, but Jervis talked over him. “You say this is just for now, that everything will be the same when you finish your work, but it won’t be. It can’t be. Whether or not you succeed, you won’t be the same person. You aren’t. And just look at what this is doing to you!” He didn’t mean to shout, but he couldn’t help it. “You’re killing yourself over this. Let it go.”

“I can’t.” That fire was back in Jon’s eyes, but now Jervis didn’t find it as exciting as he once had. Now, he was scared that fire would take Jon somewhere he wouldn’t be able to follow. In a sense, it already had. Jon was standing at the edge of a cliff, and he wasn’t looking back.

Jervis watched Jon walk away. He wanted to stop him, to make him understand how terrified he was. To share how lost and alone he felt. To bring Jon back. But he couldn’t say anything, so he pulled his blanket tighter around his body and watched half his world walk out of the yard.

 

Jervis didn’t see Jon again after he left that afternoon. Days came and went, each one stretching for an eternity yet passing in the blink of an eye. Another thunderstorm rolled through, and Jervis and Alice set up under the attic window again. Jon didn’t show up this time either, but somehow Jervis knew he was okay. In a way, this storm felt like a second chance. Alice was feeling better, and Jon wasn’t trapped outside and the thunder cracked so loud it felt like the universe was pressing the reset button. Like maybe, things could be all right.

That happiness lasted for almost a week. 

It was a cold, clear afternoon, and Jervis was walking back from town with a bag of food. As he passed the wheat field, something felt off. More than that, something felt wrong in exactly the same way as it had during the previous thunderstorm. Though he hadn’t noticed before, this field was the only one with crops still standing. Standing wasn’t the right word, but he wasn’t sure what the word was for the way the black, dead stalks of wheat remained while every field around him was barren and empty. As though in defiance of the cold, of their own death, they remained to protect the scarecrow.

Hefting his bag on his shoulder, he pushed into the field. The wheat around him cracked and snapped everywhere he stepped. It poked him and tore at his clothes, fiercely guarding its sole inhabitant.

Somehow, Jervis had thought that his last experience in this field had prepared him for this one. As he stepped into the clearing, he realized how wrong he was.

The cross that had borne the scarecrow stood empty, just two crookedly-nailed pieces of wood jutting into the sky. The twine that had held its wrists had snapped and now dangled, useless off the crossbeam. The scarecrow itself lay at the foot of the cross, and it was shaking.

Pulling aside the burlap and straw, Jervis saw Jon, curled up and twitching inside the scarecrow. He went to pick him up, to carry him home as he had last time. But when he lifted Jon from the remnants of the scarecrow, he screamed and uselessly tried to clutch at it.

“Jon? Jon, we have to go home,” Jervis whispered. “Come on, let’s get you home.”

Jon did not respond, did not even open his eyes. Jervis had not expected him to.

Ignoring the gut-wrenching screams, Jervis carried Jon out of the field and started back towards the house. As they left the field, Jon’s screams dissipated into fearful whimpers and eventually into sleep.

 

He opened the door and saw Alice standing before him.

“Help me.”

“What happened to him?”

Jervis shook his head. “Not now. I need – we need to get him inside.”

Alice ran ahead of him, opening doors and turning back the blankets on Jon’s bed. As Jervis set Jon down, trying his best to make him comfortable, Alice grabbed the bag of food from Jervis’s shoulder and disappeared to put it away. When she returned a few moments later, Jervis sat on the edge of his seat, watching as Jon shook even under his blankets.

“What’s wrong with him?” She whispered, not moving out of where she stood in the doorway.

Slowly, Jervis stood and walked out of the room, gesturing for Alice to follow. As he left, he left the door open a crack. He wasn’t quite sure why.

 

Alice lead Jervis into the library, crossed her arms, and leaned against a bookshelf. Her hands shook slightly, and her forehead was scrunched up in worry.

“Talk.”

Jervis sat on the armrest of the nearest chair. It was a small wooden thing, and the armrest wasn’t overly comfortable, but he didn’t deserve to be comfortable right now. He looked at the floor, at his hands, anywhere but Alice as he spoke. “The research he’s doing… it’s killing him and he won’t stop.

“He’s trying to cure fear, but he can only test it on himself. He’s making himself more scared than anyone has ever been before. I found him by – well, in – the scarecrow. And this isn’t the first time.”

“How many times?” Alice’s voice was strained with the effort to keep emotion out of it. He didn’t know exactly what she was feeling, but he could guess. Anger. Fear. Worry. Everything he felt, with added betrayal for being kept in the dark.

“This is the second time I’ve found him there, but it can’t only be the second time he’s tested this.” Jervis looked up at Alice, trying to ask her forgiveness without words.

“Why didn’t you tell me?”

Jervis winced. “I didn’t want to worry you.”

“You didn’t want to worry me? My best friend is doing this to himself and you thought you’d keep it all to yourself because you didn’t want to worry me?” Alice’s voice grew louder and higher-pitched as she spoke, gesticulating violently.

Jervis was not dealing with that at this very moment. Instead, he shrugged and said “We can’t stop him. I’ve tried.” 

“He has to want to stop for himself. You can’t just make him do things, Jervis.” Alice spoke slowly, voice low. Jervis got the distinct impression she thought he should have known that without her having to tell him. He didn’t appreciate being condescended to.

“Why not? I’m trying to help him!”

“So tell him that.”

“I have!” He hissed.

“So tell him again. Show him that this isn’t only affecting him.” With a sigh, Alice sat down heavily in the chair across from Jervis.

“Okay.” With a deep breath, he stood and left the room.

 

After leaving the library, Jervis sat in Jon’s room. Officially, he was there to keep an eye on him and make sure he didn’t suffer any ill effects from whatever he had done to himself. Unofficially, he didn’t have anywhere else to go.

When Jon woke up, the sun had long since set. Jervis had tried to keep the room as well-lit as possible, but it still felt distinctly gloomy. He opened his mouth to speak, but Jon cut him off.

“I know what you’re going to say to me. Look what’s happened, I have to stop this now. But I can’t. I’m so close, I can’t give up now.”

As much as he hated it, he really couldn’t think of a counter-argument. Alice was right; until Jon wanted to stop, he would keep on doing what he was doing, with no regard to his own health. “At least be careful. Don’t get yourself killed.”

“I won’t.” Jon crossed his arms. Jervis got the sense that he very much wanted to roll his eyes, and was unsure why he didn’t.

“Promise?”

“Promise.”

 

The next day, Jon didn’t leave immediately. Instead, they all ate together, ventured out into the yard in search of the woods, and were driven back inside by a biting wind. For a moment or two, Jervis could overlook the tension between the three of them and just _be_ again. Eventually, Jon did leave, but he did so with a smile on his face. 

 

As the weather got colder, Alice took a turn for the worse. After that night in the attic, Jervis had been sure the end was near, but then she had seemed to bounce back to normal, to being as healthy as she had ever been. As he found out late in the afternoon of one particularly unpleasant day, death hadn’t decided to pass by Alice. Instead, it had simply become invisible after so long hovering so close.

Alice looked up from the book in her lap. She hadn’t turned a page in several minutes, but Jervis hadn’t commented and she had kept staring at it in a common acceptance of her pretense. They sat, neither of them reading but both pretending to, in Alice’s room. She was propped up with an extraordinary amount of pillows in her bed while he curled up in a chair nearby. It wasn’t the most comfortable way to sit in the chair, but there was something more reassuring about sitting this way. That, and it was easier to fit completely under a blanket.

“Tell Jon it’s okay,” Alice said.

“What is?”

“That he’s not here.”

Jervis closed his book, using the inside flap of the dust jacket as his bookmark. “I can go get him.” He started to stand up, but Alice shook her head.

“But then you won’t be here either, silly.”

“Here for what?” They both knew for what, but he had denied this inevitable for so long, and he didn’t want to stop now.

Alice sighed. “I don’t have much longer now.” She set her book aside, and it fell closed. Without a bookmark, it was pristine. If he didn’t know better, Jervis could almost have thought it had never been opened.

“Don’t say that.”

Jervis unfolded himself from his chair and sat on the side of Alice’s bed. Gently, he took her arm from where it lay on her lap and placed two fingers on the inside of her wrist. He did not count the beats, and Alice did not count the seconds. They didn’t need to. Just under Alice’s skin lay a river of fire, the blood pumping faster than he ever thought possible and the temperature hot enough to burn.

“Stay with me,” she said, taking his hand.

“I will,” he whispered. “I’d never leave you, Alice.” He barely managed a whisper, emotion threatening to block his voice. “Please don’t leave me.”

Alice met his eyes. He saw there the same unshed tears he knew were in his own. She squeezed his hand and smiled. “I wish I didn’t have to.”

Jervis didn’t know how long he stayed there, sitting beside Alice. When the light began to turn from golden to orange, he said “I love you, Alice. And Jon loves you too. Don’t ever forget that.”

“I love you too.” Alice’s voice was so soft he could barely hear her. Beneath his fingers, Alice’s already-burning veins grew even hotter.

“I don’t know what I’ll do without you.”

Alice winced and glanced at her wrist. “See the world for me. But don’t get too lost, okay?”

Jervis attempted to smile, just for her, but he knew all his face showed was his fear and grief. He wanted to hug her, but as he turned to face her completely she gasped and the life flickered out of her eyes. And then Jervis couldn’t stop himself, he pulled her body close and held her as he cried, as the lifeless thing that used to be his sister cooled in his arms.

 

That night was a blur. Jervis only remembered it in flashes: finally letting go of her, the room so dark he could barely see. Shuffling to the chair and curling up there, out of tears to cry but still so, so empty. Jon opening the door just after dawn and just standing in shocked silence.

Jon found two shovels in the shed behind the house.

“Here,” Jervis said. 

He stood under the tree, looking towards the woods, and beyond them, the rising sun. Solemnly, Jon handed him a shovel, and they got to work. As he dug, Jervis cried, tears he thought had dried up overnight but that just kept coming. Next to him, Jon cried as well. There was no sound aside from their shovels chipping away at the earth.

Thick clouds gathered as they worked. The temperature dropped. By the time they had dug a satisfactory grave, the ground had started to freeze, as had the tears on their faces. 

A light snow fell as they carried Alice out and lay her in the grave. In the dim light, she looked even further from life. Her skin was too pale, almost blending into the white of the nightdress she wore. Her hair pillowed around her like a halo. 

“Wherever you are now, Alice, I hope it’s wonderful.” Jervis could barely hear his own voice, thick and scratchy as it was. “I miss you, and I love you.” 

“I hate that I wasn’t there for you,” Jon said, “but there was never a moment where I didn’t love you, Alice.”

They picked their shovels back up as the snow fell heavier. Slowly, Alice’s ethereal body was covered with a mound of dirt.

And as they stood there, snow already beginning to cover the new mound before them and coming to rest on the rough wooden cross, Jervis could feel the tears freeze on his face and in his eyelashes. He looked at Jon beside him, and though they both wore thick coats to stop the cold, Jervis saw the needle marks he knew clustered in Jon’s left elbow. 

Jon reached out a hand; Jervis took it. Jon had stepped off the cliff, but he had looked back as he fell. Jervis closed his eyes against the wind, and leapt off into the space where Alice’s grave used to be. As he fell, he thought he could see Jon just in front of him, both plummeting to the bottom of this endless void.

 

Jervis opened his eyes. The snow had stopped. In its place was a gray sleet. He held a cup of tea. It was still hot. He was in the library. Jon was not next to him.

He walked around the perimeter of the room, trailing his fingers along the spines of the books he passed. He stopped when his fingers hit empty air in the middle of a shelf. A thin space sat empty, and on the table in front of him, _Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland_ ’s gold letters sparkled in the candlelight. Jervis left the room.

 

The sun had set, but the candle on the library table was still burning. Jervis stared at the flame as he traced the letters on the cover of the book before him. Over the years, he had read and reread this book so many times he had lost count. Surely, he thought, once more wouldn’t hurt.

Even as he thought that, he knew he was lying to himself. But it didn’t matter, not as he flipped open its red cover and whispered the first words: “Down the rabbit hole.”

Alice’s favorite character had always been, well, Alice. A girl who could have the best adventures, could do anything she put her mind to, regardless of physical or mental ability. Jervis had never had a favorite character. He had been fascinated by the madness of it all, and he had loved the book’s Alice as he loved his own, but there had never been a character he could truly relate to. 

As he reread the story, holding back tears, he found a piece of himself. Time had stopped for the Hatter as punishment for a bad song and a worse joke. Before, he could not fathom time stopping. Time had always been a vague haze for him, with nothing much to distinguish the days aside from the changing of the seasons. Time had not only stopped, it had ceased to exist on that cold autumn day. With every moment that passed, Jervis remained the same, bottled up in the tiny slice of time when he watched Alice breathe her last. He could feel himself becoming divorced from reality, just as the Hatter and the March Hare had, but he did not know how to stop it.

 

It was drizzling when he figured it out. If he could no longer experience the passage of time as he once had, he must make that separation permanent. 

His head snapped up and he saw his wild-eyed reflection in the fogged window. “Time stopped for him, as it has for me, so now the Hatter I must be,” he muttered. 

When he was ready to begin, the table was barely visible under the piles he had dropped on it. He placed the iron in the fire, rolled out a strip of linen, and smiled.

The fire had burned down to embers by the time Jervis stitched the deep red silk onto his new hat. He looked at his creation—tall, slightly slanted, perfect—and smiled.

 

There was a trunk on the front step. Jervis was unsure how it had gotten there. Vaguely, he recognized it as being from that traitor, and yet he still didn’t know how it had come to be on his front step. Was it that time of year already?

Jervis blinked, and he and the trunk were in the sitting room. Well, he and Alice called it the sitting room anyway. In their lifetimes, no one important enough to justify taking the dust covers off the ornate chairs had set foot on their island. Sometimes, when they were children, they had pretended to be royalty and this was their throne room. In fact, Jervis thought he could hear Alice’s high, delighted laughter from just outside, pretending—

And then it was gone and Jervis sat in suffocating silence as he stared at the dress carefully folded in the trunk in front of him, a dress that would never have an occupant.

 

Later that day (It was dark now. When did that happen?) Jervis threw the trunk, still fully packed, into the attic. It was so heavy that he could barely lift it and the effort of throwing it nearly knocked him over. He stood in the doorway, panting, his hat askew and his hair a wreck. 

The light from a flickering candle by his feet that he did not remember lighting barely reached where the trunk had landed, tipped on its side and scuffed. 

As he leaned in the doorway, waiting to be able to breathe again, Jervis listened to the sound of his heartbeat. He could hear Alice’s too, beating slower than his. But Alice was dead she was in the back garden _her heart wasn’t beating_. That didn’t stop him from hearing it. _Ba-bum, ba-bum, ba-bum_ slowly morphing into a steady _tick, tock, tick, tock_.

And now Jervis sat on the trunk with a pocket watch in his hand. The dirty gold chain ran over his knee. Slowly, he opened the face of the watch. _Tick. Tock._ The hands spun like mad behind his own reflection. His hat still barely clung to the side of his head, his hair stuck to his face, and he watched as a manic grin spread over his own features.

 

Sometime later, Jon moved in. He hadn’t ever definitively told Jervis he was doing so, he just returned to the town less and less until he no longer lived there. Officially, he had a bedroom, the same one he had used on occasion before. Jervis wasn’t sure Jon had stayed there since he moved in. Most days, they slept on the floor or on a couch or in a chair when their eyes couldn’t stay awake any longer. 

One of those nights, Jervis had mumbled “Don’t ever leave me” into Jon’s shoulder.

He’d never gotten an answer. Possibly, hopefully, Jon had been asleep.

 

Now, Jervis propped the pocket watch open on the table in front of him. Leaning back against the wall, he stared into its face as it ticked out the passing of each second. _Tick. Tock. Tick. Tock._ Time had stopped, refused to let him pass through and continue living. _Tick. Tock._ So why had this incessant countdown not ceased? Its ticks signified nothing, frozen as he had become. _Tick. Tock._ The watch defiantly ticked away.

Jon rushed into the room, preceded by the sound of breaking glass. “Do you have—”

“In the kitchen,” Jervis cut him off.

Jon rushed back out of the room, carrying several glasses in his arms and with a blanket pulled around him as a coat.

The room had grown so dark Jervis could barely see the watch still on the table when Jon settled down next to him. He was still wearing the blanket and he had scorch marks on his fingers.

“Does it tell you anything?” He asked.

Jervis blinked. “It never stops ticking. Every second is so slow, and yet how few days go to make up a century.”

“To me, the time seems to race, and yet the days rarely change. Yet I’m finally nearing the end of my great experiment.”

“You will bottle fear?”

Jon nodded. “And we both will overcome.”

Jervis nodded absently and lost himself in the steady rhythm of his watch.

 

Days- weeks- passed. Sometimes, Jervis found Jon slumped over a table in the vacant bedroom he had converted into a laboratory, passed out. Other times he would pass the room at odd hours of the night just to hear the clattering and muttered curses that meant Jon was hard at work. It was comforting to know he wasn’t truly alone in the house.

One cold, sunny day, Jervis decided to make another hat. He lost himself in the beginning, in the smooth motion of ironing the linen. The sun passed over the house as he lacquered it, shaped it, let it dry. The windows were black when he made the finishing touches.

Somewhere in his waking dream, he heard Alice call to him from outside the room. “Jervis, look what I found!” Her voice was too young, it was the voice of a child, but he would know his sister anywhere. “Come and see!”

When he threw open the door, the hall was empty.

The next day, he stood in front of the mirror for a long time. He couldn’t remember when he had decided on the mustache and goatee, but he rather liked it. He briefly wondered if Jon liked it, thought back to see if he could ever remember Jon expressing any opinion on his appearance at all, and asked himself why it mattered. Jervis glared at the mirror. While his facial hair might have fit his aesthetic, this hat did not. His new hat, made with black silk instead of the blood red of the first, was in all respects better. It was taller, less lopsided, more authoritative, and yet. Jervis felt like he was playing dress-up. This was a gentleman’s hat. There was nothing mad about it. He sighed, put the hat in a box in his room, and got back to work. 

When Jervis next looked up, he stood in front of the same mirror. He wore a new hat, a purple one that, when he looked closely, bore a design not unlike shattered glass. A stripe of black ribbon lay around the bottom. It had been made with a purposeful dent in one side, and the top slanted at a not insignificant angle. It was perfect.

Behind him in the mirror, a ghostly Alice smiled dangerously.

 

A sliver of pale blue flitted around the corner. Jervis blinked and walked faster to catch it, but when he turned the corner, the blue was just turning the corner at the far end of the hall. It was clearly a dress, one Alice had owned when she was a few years younger. He was running now. Alice was here, she was just around the corner. He turned the corner and there she was, wearing that blue dress that hadn’t fit her for years, standing in the hall, her back to him.

“Alice? Have you come back?”

Alice turned around. Her eyes were solid black. Under her face, a map of her veins glowed. “Why do you chase me?”

“Because I always have,” he sighed, ragged with emotion. “Because you’re so much, and- and you can’t be gone.” 

“All that running, you’re going to end up someplace you don’t want to be.” Alice smiled, her face twisting impossibly.

Jervis shook his head. “It takes all the running you can do, to keep in the same place.”

“I think you’ll find yourself in quite a different spot than when you started.” 

“I must not be fast enough, then.” Jervis reached out a hand. “Come back to me.”

Alice shook her head. “Goodbye, brother.”

As she began to fade from view, Jon stepped out into the hallway. His clothes seemed more ragged than normal. If Jervis didn’t know better, he could have mistaken his friend for the scarecrow in the field.

“Was there someone in here?”

Jervis tore his eyes from Alice, still half-visible, almost skeletal, between them. She smiled, and it was the sort of smile he had never seen on Alice’s face. It was pure malice. “N- no,” he stammered.

A small plume of smoke burst from the room behind Jon. He glanced at it, concerned. “I thought I heard you talking to someone.”

“Nope.” The thing that could not be Alice was still smiling evilly. He looked through her to see Jon rush back into his room. When the door closed, she was gone.

Jervis leaned against the wall, his red top hat askew and his hair a long, tangled mess. He did not notice the tears on his face until he could barely see through them.

 

The sound of shattering glass snapped Jervis out of his thoughts. He had been walking somewhere – going outside? It didn’t matter now (if it had even mattered then) because something had broken and that meant –

He heard a muffled curse and turned to face the door on his right. As he did, it burst open and Jon ran out, coughing and holding his shirt over his face. He shouted something, but it was too late. A cloud of greenish smoke poured out of the room, enveloping Jon, who squeezed his eyes shut and pushed his shirt more frantically over his mouth and nose. Jervis simply stood, eyes wide and mouth hanging partly open, as it washed over him.

He didn’t think, and so he breathed. And that breath turned into a scream.

 

_Jonathan laughed, loud and clear. The storm raged around him and the field spread below him, torn by the wind and pummeled by the rain. He dragged his hand through the wheat. His fingers tore long trenches through the field, dirt and plants ripped up and sucked into the whirlwind. This was his world now._

_He laughed, destroying everything in sight with sharp talons and a bone-deep desire for revenge. The village kids who had excluded him, the island too barren to ever be a true home, the father who didn’t want his child. Nothing would be spared from his feverish anger. As he took everything from them, they would watch, frozen in the terror he had always felt and now never would again._

_As his fingers ripped through a small stand of trees, he felt something – someone – alive. Standing in the middle of the destruction, head tipped to the sky and an utterly blank expression on his face, was Jervis, softly singing a nonsense song. He seemed to exist somehow apart from the carnage that surrounded him. The wind, strong enough to rip up trees only a few feet away, did not even ruffle his hair, grown too long now that he didn’t care enough to cut it. The rain, though it fell thick enough to render the manor Jonathan knew to be just over the hill invisible, did not touch his shabbily posh coat and ridiculously large hat._

_Though Jervis was unaffected by the storm, he was not immune to the fear. Just as with everyone else, the sight of the scarecrow – of Jonathan – caused every bit of color to drain from his skin. Though he did not stop the singing, Jonathan knew he was petrified. He watched his best friend, the only person he truly cared for, mumble and spin his hat in his hands, eyes glued to the ground. And for the first time, Jonathan wanted to spare someone._

_He reached down, to pick up Jervis and bring him into the clouds with him, to save him from the Scarecrow in the same way Jonathan had been saved – by becoming it. But instead, his needles stabbed through Jervis’s chest, spattering blood across the grain. As everything faded to black, Jonathan could still hear Jervis mumbling, only now the nonsense song was gone. Instead, as his lungs slowly filled with blood, Jervis repeated Jonathan’s name._

 

Jervis slowly uncurled himself and sat up, slumping back against the wall. His hair was matted and hanging over his eyes. He pushed it behind his ear and wiped his nose on his sleeve. His eyelashes were stuck together and his face felt damp, but he didn’t remember crying.

“What was that?”

Jon sat in front of him, sleeves pulled over his fingers. His eyes flickered all over Jervis, cataloguing him. He was worried, Jervis could see that much, but he knew Jon was systematically filing all this in his brain. Observing the effects.

“Fear,” Jon said.

“Pure fear?” 

“I’d been trying to make a vaccine,” Jon began. He hesitated, and Jervis nodded, he remembered, but whatever had hit him in that cloud had not been a vaccine. It was something worse.

“I couldn’t make it. Every time I tried, with every new formula, it all lead back to this. I couldn’t cure fear, but I distilled it. The problem is, the body can’t overcome the toxin. No matter how I make it, I end up with a form of fear so concentrated it’s poisonous.”

“That’s brilliant.”

Jon’s shoulders slumped. “No it isn’t. I failed.”

“No. With this – Can you imagine what we could do with this?” Jervis couldn’t see himself as his mouth curled up, but he knew he looked dangerous. Dangerous and mad.

He watched that calculating spark flicker back to life inside Jon’s eyes, the one that would send any sane person running for their life. It was captivating.

“We could be kings.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Wow this is a long one. Five months in the making, I suppose it has to be. I wish I could promise the final chapter soon, but if I'm being honest this chapter took me a semester and the next one probably will too. Even though it will take forever to finish, I won't abandon this work.  
> If anyone thought some lines of dialogue sounded familiar, I lifted some stuff from _Through the Looking Glass_ and _Dracula_.  
>  Next chapter: more madness! more characters! actual shippy stuff!  
> Shoutout to @boossuet for their enthusiasm about last chapter, I wasn't sure anyone would really enjoy this au except me, but your comments were really inspiring.


	3. Chapter 3

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> What happens when there isn't so much of a destination for life's journey? Or, have you truly set sail?

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I don't really like this chapter. I wrote it over such a long stretch of time, and with so many breaks in when i was able to write, that I don't think it flows at all. But hey, it's fine. Also, I've given up on characterization. Are they anything like Jervis and Jonathan from Gotham? Probably not. Is that a problem I intend to fix? No. Will I continue writing them this way anyway? Absolutely.  
> Again, warning for needles, though they're just kind of mentioned, and not anywhere near as descriptively as in previous chapters. Also warning for the threat of violence to children, though no children are actually harmed (and, as they're hypnotized, they won't even remember being threatened). If I need to warn for anything else please tell me and I'll add it.

Someone was knocking.

Someone was knocking on the door and they wouldn’t go away.

Jervis wasn’t sure what time it was, but he knew it was far too early for someone to be knocking on the door and refusing to go away after being ignored.

He opened his eyes without rising from the couch and squinted. The sun, determined to blind him, shone directly into his eyes from where it perched just atop the trees. It seemed to be in the process of setting. He glared at the window and shot a particularly nasty glance at the front door, where the persistent knocker had, finally, abandoned hope of someone answering the door. With a muffled groan, he threw an arm over his eyes and fell back asleep.

Several hours later, Jervis woke up in a dark room. He still lay on the couch, but at some point Jon had thrown a blanket on him. The birds had not started chirping and no noise came from Jon’s lab, so the house was completely silent. There were no candles in the room. The only light came from the moon, which looked to be nearly full, so Jervis could see well enough to move around without running into anything. Remembering the persistent knocker of earlier, he opened the front door. Thankfully, no one was there, but a large trunk sat on the porch. 

Jervis squinted at the trunk. It appeared to really exist, but he kicked it just to be sure. The definitely-real trunk continued to sit in the same spot, completely unaffected by the kick. Only after he had stared at the trunk for several minutes did Jervis realize where he was. Outside on his porch, in the dead of night, wearing nothing but an incorrectly buttoned shirt and pants, an outfit he suspected he had worn for several days. By all rights, he should have been freezing. After all, he had become the hatter sometime around the end of November, and he had not been the hatter for very long. But he was not cold, and the trunk on his porch could only mean that April had arrived.

Jervis dragged the offending trunk inside and lit a candle. The warm light did nothing to help the strange feeling of distance Jervis had, like he was watching himself from somewhere far away. His hands opened the latch on the trunk and flipped open the lid. His eyes registered white lace and lavender silk before a haze of anger and sadness overtook him.

A few minutes later, he heard footsteps approach from behind and Jon’s voice ask “When did that come in?”

In the soft light of a cloudy midday, Jervis noticed the candle had burned down and extinguished himself. He thought he might know how it was April already.

“Yesterday,” he said, and hoped it was true.

Jon nodded.

“He doesn’t know she’s gone. It has been months and he couldn’t be bothered to find out that Alice is –“Jervis knew in the back of his mind that his father had not been told of Alice’s death, but it didn’t matter. All that mattered was that Alice had been dead for almost half a year and it was all because their father had given up and left them. “He left us here to die and didn’t even know that she’d finally succeeded.”

“I’m sorry.” Jon sat down next to him.

The longer Jervis sat and stared at that trunk full of things for Alice, the angrier he got. “No. He’s going to be.”

“How?” Jon asked, calm but interested.

Jervis shrugged. “I’ll pay him a visit, get creative with it.” He paused, took a deep breath, and took Jon’s hand to give himself some courage. “Come with me. Bring your concentrated fear and let’s test it out on him. Have some fun.”

“You’re not coming back, are you,” Jon observed with much the same tone he might use to note that it was raining out. 

Jervis shook his head. He hadn’t consciously made any sort of decision, but as he spoke, he knew what he said was true. “I can’t. I’ve lived my whole life in his house, waiting for a package he sends me. I don’t know what life is like outside of the island, but everywhere I go here, I expect to see her just around the corner, and she’s never going to be there. I need to be somewhere she never was, and I can’t do that here. Please come with me. We could do so much out there.”

“Out where?” Jon asked.

“Anywhere.”

“Let me get my stuff.” Jon squeezed Jervis’s hand before dropping it and leaving the room. Jervis watched him go. He could hardly breathe for how happy and relieved he was. He knew now that he had to leave the island, but he didn’t think he could do it if it meant leaving Jon. As he started packing, a wide smile on his face, he began building a plan of action for when he confronted his father. 

After all, he had a few days to make it perfect.

 

A day or two later (he couldn’t be exactly sure), Jervis found himself in town, in a store. His arms were full of food, and as he walked to the counter, he grabbed a loaf of bread. Behind the counter, a bored kid that was significantly taller than him, though probably a few years younger, seemed to register his presence. 

“You got money for all that?” He asked skeptically, looking back and forth from the large pile of food to Jervis’s admittedly disheveled appearance.

Jervis dug around in the pockets of his coat - he couldn’t truly have been so absent-minded as to forget money, could he? He pulled out a crumbling flower, a scrap of blue fabric, and his watch from his pocket as he tried to find the money that had to be in there somewhere.

The boy behind the counter cocked his head to the side. “Hey, what’s that ticking noise?”

“My watch,” Jervis said distractedly.

The boy’s fingers started to tap along with the ticking, and Jervis looked up to apologize for how long he was taking when he noticed the boy’s eyes begin to glaze over. The boy stared at the watch blankly, fingers tapping along, _tick, tock, tick, tock_.

“It does have a very distinctive noise, doesn’t it?”

“Yes.”

If asked after the fact, Jervis would not be able to give a good reason for why he did what he did next. For what happened was that Jervis had an idea. Jon was the one who did the scientific reading; Jervis usually stuck to fantastical stories. But Jon had been telling him something about Mesmer, a man who had done some questionable but fascinating research some time ago, and Jervis had listened. He raised his pocketwatch and flipped open the lid. “Look into my eyes.”

With that, the last of the independence drained from the boy’s eyes. “You wouldn’t mind if I took this, would you?”

“No.”

“Wonderful.”

Jervis dumped the food in a bag he took from behind the counter. The boy watched him do it, face blank, and didn’t say a word. For good measure, Jervis grabbed another loaf of bread as he walked out the door.

 

Jervis stood next to Jon at the end of the dock. They’d walked over to the town early that morning, carrying (though in some cases, that meant dragging) the trunks into which they had packed all of their belongings. Or at least, all of the belongings they were taking with them. It was strange, packing up his life, because Jervis was struck by how few things he actually had. He had his clothes, and his hats, and his copy of Alice in Wonderland, and really not much else. Jon had even less, as in place of the rather bulky hats all he had was a ratty scarecrow outfit. 

“Strange to be leaving.” Jervis looked around the village. He knew he should feel sad he was leaving the only place he’d ever known, or nervous at going out into the world, or even excited at finally giving his father what he deserved. He didn’t. Really, he didn’t feel much of anything, just a mild boredom, like a fog hung in the inside of his head.

Though the day was cloudy, Jon squinted against the light. Neither of them had gone outside much in the past few months, with Jon generally leaving his makeshift lab only at night.

“Not too strange.”

“No,” Jervis shook his head in agreement, “not too strange.”

From the ferry, the captain shouted “You two coming or what? I ain’t got all day!”

Jervis smiled ruefully as they hefted their trunks. “After you.”

Before they could get off the docks, the captain stopped them. “Tickets?” He asked in a flat tone.

Jervis dug through his pocket. He didn’t have tickets, but he did have something better, if only he could - there. With a smug expression, he pulled out his pocketwatch. Jon raised an eyebrow, and Jervis got the sense that he would have crossed his arms in judgement had be not been holding a trunk.

“You got tickets, or what?”

“Yes, tickets. But first, can you hear my watch ticking?” Jervis asked. There was a small chance that this wouldn’t work, that whatever had happened in the store yesterday was a fluke and that he’d get them both kicked out of town. But somehow, he knew that wasn’t going to happen.

Jon audibly sighed, presumably in exasperation.

“Yes,” the captain said, and though his tone was still flat, its aggressive overtones were beginning to fade away.

“The ticking, it synchronizes with your heartbeat. Now, look into my eyes.” When his eyes locked with the captain’s, Jervis felt a sort of thrill, the sense that not only could he do this, he could do anything. He could make anyone do anything. Innocently, he asked, “Do we need tickets?”

“No.”

“Excellent. You will take us to the mainland, and then you will awaken. You will not remember us.”

“I will take you to the mainland. I will not remember you,” the captain repeated in a monotone.He moved to stand behind the wheel and motioned for his scant crew to assist his passengers.

Leaving their bags to the care of the crew, Jervis and Jon walked to the front of the boat. As they moved, Jervis reflected on the crew. They themselves were not hypnotized, and yet they were still under his control, merely in a roundabout sort of way. Could he directly control more than one person? He’d have to test that.

“So you can do mind control?” Jon asked, just a little too casually, as the ferry started moving.

“Hypnotism,” Jervis corrected.

“When did you figure that out?”

“Yesterday. I didn’t hypnotize you into coming with me, in case you were wondering.”

Jon made a _hmph_ noise that was barely too quiet to be an ironic huff and said “I never said you did.”

Jervis shrugged. “It seemed like a reasonable assumption. I asked you to drop everything and run away with me, and you did.”

Jon cocked his head to the side. “I’m not dropping everything. There will be more books on the mainland, and I can learn more things, and I can make a better lab there.”

“But your family?”

“I’ve lived with you for months now, Jervis. Didn’t you think that was suspicious?” Jon stared out at the ocean in front of them as he spoke. “I tested my fear gas on my father a while ago. Even before that, I’d never intended to stay.”

“Oh.” Jervis hadn’t really thought about why Jon had moved in, he’d just seen that he had and never bothered to find out why. His first thought was to hug Jon, to make sure he knew he cared even if he’d been kind of a bad friend recently, but he knew Jon probably wouldn’t appreciate it. Instead, he stood next to Jon, just close enough that their arms could touch where they’re propped up on the boat railing.

“I’m sorry.”

“For what? It was my choice.” Jon still looked out to sea, like he was straining to see the land ahead of them when all that was visible was the open ocean.

“I wasn’t there for you when I should have been.”

Jon shrugged. “It’s been a hard winter.”

“I always want to be there for you.” Jervis smiled apologetically, though he knew Jon wasn’t looking. “That’s what friends are for.”

Neither of them spoke as the ferry finally pulled far enough away from the island that it disappeared into the blue-gray haze of the sky. Neither of them were looking.

 

Standing on the dock in a strange city with nothing but Jon and a single chest full of their belongings, Jervis felt reasonably confident he’d done the right thing. He was moving on, or rather, he’d find his father and make him suffer, then move on. This was personal growth.

“So,” Jon said, “where does your father live?”

Jervis shrugged and began rifling through his pockets.

“Is it at least in this city?”

At last, he pulled out a scrap of paper. On it was the address of the manor, and in the top corner was a smaller address, written in a precise hand. The shipping label for the most recent trunk his father had sent, complete with a return address.

“We can find out.”

 

The address was not, it turned out, in the same city, though it was nearby. Jervis spoke to a cab driver, and they were off. Riding in a cab was not something Jervis had done before, or something he’d ever had a particular interest in doing. The horse smelled distinctly horse-like, which while it couldn’t be smelled from inside the cab, was a reminder to keep the windows closed. Roads were bumpy, as the rain had hollowed out spaces between the stones seemingly designed to trap wheels. Still, this was a new experience, and he was determined to be delighted with the journey. It was certainly faster than walking, anyway. And he had to admit that, when his hypnotized driver opened the door for them and handed them their luggage, he felt important in a new way. Almost respected, though he knew the mindless zombie of a driver could no more respect him than could a rat.

 

Jervis’s father lived in a tall row house in a neighborhood that appeared to either have once been fashionable or was in the process of becoming fashionable. The houses were freshly painted and some even sported fake columns outside the door, but the street itself was barely held together. His father’s house was a light blue, and the front door bore a sign: Tetch, MD. 

Only a couple of blocks away, the neighborhood gave way to houses where the columns were slightly off-kilter and the roofs sagged dangerously. The small flowerbeds in front of the windows were still full of dead stalks from the previous fall, but small green shoots were beginning to spring up among them. 

“That one,” Jervis said, pointing to a listing house painted a faded pink. One window near the front had a jagged crack running through it, and the house number had fallen off. 

The house was empty, so they dragged their luggage into the front room, where it left a trail through the dust. 

“Acceptable?” Jervis asked, surveying their surroundings. 

Jon coughed, whether from the dust they had kicked up or in judgement Jervis didn’t know. “It feels like someone took all the furniture out of the parts of your house no one uses.”

Jervis kicked a leaf that had blown in through the cracked window. It fell to dust under his shoe. “We can find someplace else if you want.”

“No, it’s fine. Probably as good as we’re going to get for squatting, anyway.”

“I’m pretty sure I could ask someone for their house.”

“No.”

“Okay.”

Jervis perched on the luggage while Jon half leaned, half sat on the windowsill. The street outside was still empty even as the sun began to set. The golden rays warped as they passed through the cracked glass, leaving a scar in the illuminated square on the floor.

“How does this all work, anyway?” Jervis asked.

“It’s not like I’ve done this before either, Jervis. How should I know? Besides, didn’t you say you had a plan?”

“Oh, yes!” Jervis jumped up, suddenly remembering. “I should visit the house before the sun completely sets, just to leave a little surprise.”

Jon raised an eyebrow. “Care to tell?”

“Hm. No, I think it’s going to be a surprise for everyone.”

“‘kay. Hey, with the mind control thing -”

“Hypnotism.”

“Yeah. D’you think it has to be with that specific watch?”

Jervis sat back down. “Hm?”

“Well, like does the hypnotism work because of you, or because of the watch?” Jon gestured with his hands as he spoke, words coming slowly but his hands moving far faster. “Because the science says it should be able to be done with any watch, but if that’s the case, why don’t we hear of people successfully hypnotizing others all the time? So the question remains. Is it you, and so you’d be able to hypnotize someone with any watch, is it the watch itself, which would be able to be used by anyone, or is it the specific combination of the two?”

“I’d never thought of it, really,” Jervis said, tilting his head to the side. “We could test it. If you take the watch, can you hypnotize someone?”

Jon held out his hand, and Jervis gave him the watch.

“So how do you do it?”

“I’m not entirely certain. I generally ask if someone can hear the watch and make eye contact with them, the rest kind of just happens.”

“I can’t test this on you,” Jon reasoned. “That would add in a confounding variable. Should we find someone else?”

Jervis shook his head. “Tomorrow. I really do need to speak to my father’s family before he arrives, and I’d rather not miss my window.”

Jon handed the watch back with a sigh. “When you get back, you get to help me make this place livable. There’s enough dust to actually choke someone if they tried to sleep on this floor.” He kicked a floorboard, which obligingly produced a horrifyingly large puff of dust, to prove his point.

“Wouldn’t miss it for the world,” Jervis said wryly before dropping the watch back into his coat pocket and heading out.

 

Jervis waited until late to sneak back into his father’s house. In the daylight, it had been rather nice. Calm, anyway. He’d left his surprise and walked out the front door. He didn’t know how to whistle, but if he did he would have been whistling softly to himself. It was that kind of day.

Returning at night was completely different. No longer did Jervis feel light, like all the pieces of his plan were perfectly slotting into place. Now that it was the night of the crime, he felt only a deep excitement tempered by a tingling fear that his plan would fail. He shook that aside as he and Jon snuck in a back door he’d unlocked earlier. Everyone else in the house was asleep, and the night made the darkness nearly impenetrable in the shadows. Jon, in full Scarecrow attire, leaned on the wall in one of those dark corners. Jervis sat in a nearby armchair and crossed his legs. 

“Now,” Jervis said with a smile.

Jon pushed a framed family photograph off a nearby shelf, the glass shattering as it hit the floor. Upstairs, feet hit the floor, and the footsteps passed above them, heading to the staircase.

“Good evening, father.” Jervis lit a candle, its small flame the only light in the dark house. The light flickered and bounced, casting odd, dark shadows across his face. “Or should I call you Dr. Tetch, the name carved upon your door? For, Dr. Tetch, you are my father no more.”

“Jervis? Is that you?” A voice came from near the stairwell.

He could barely remember that voice. It trembled like a child’s, confusion and worry threaded through every note. Before, Jervis could have forgotten it. Now, he wished he had. When he was done here, he would never see his father again, never hear his voice. If he left him alive, that was.

“A man who cannot recognize his own son.” Jervis raised an eyebrow, words dripping venom. 

“Is Alice here?” His father walked toward the center of the room, trying to keep his voice steady. It didn’t work.

All Jervis had done was light a candle, and his father was already afraid. Perhaps his entire plan was not needed. He heard the unending ticking of his pocket watch and the rustle of canvas, and all he knew was rage. “Alice has gone where the good all go, the place you doomed her to so long ago.” 

“I’m sorry. I’m so sorry. There was nothing I could have done.” He did not sound sorry. He sounded like a man who had convinced himself he was blameless when nothing was further from the truth.

“You could have stayed. Tried to help her, to help us! But you didn’t, did you? You’re nothing but a coward.”

“Why are you here, Jervis? There is nothing more I can do for her now.” He held up his hands as if to demonstrate his lack of ability. They shook slightly, uncontrollably.

Jervis stepped forward. The candle fully illuminated his face as he said “No. It is much too late for that. But I am not as good as Alice, and there is still much you can do for me.” He smiled his most dangerous smile, the one he had honed until it spoke every threat, wordlessly promised pain.

His father broke. “Please don’t hurt me,” he begged.

“Oh, I won’t,” Jervis said, satisfaction coating every word. He looked to the stairs and called in a sing-song voice, “Come out, come out, wherever you are!” 

A little boy emerged from the shadows of the stairwell, dragging a small, worn blanket behind him. His brown hair was rumpled from sleep and his eyes were still half closed. Behind him walked a little girl, maybe a year or two older. Her hands were empty and her eyes dead. Following them was a short, round woman whose hair was only half down, like she had stopped taking the pins out halfway through the process. She was young, but had the beginnings of crows’ feet from too much smiling. Now though, her face was just as blank as the children’s.

They stood in a line and turned to face Dr. Tetch. Like good little marionettes, Jervis thought.

“What have you done to them,” his father demanded, voice still uncertain but threaded with a steel that hadn’t been there a moment before.

Jervis smiled. “So it’s only now you have some spine? What do you want me to say, that they’ll be fine? Why should I promise that now, before my work is done? Why, that would ruin all the fun!”

He took a step toward his father. “I can make your son take the life of your wife.”

The little boy shuffled into the kitchen, where he pulled a knife from a drawer. He walked closer to his mother, whose face remained impassive, until Jervis shook his head.

“Why, I could make your daughter believe she can fly,” he giggled. (He was not sure if he could actually do this, as he hadn’t tested whether survival instincts overruled hypnosis yet. He was, however, reasonably confident.)

The color drained from his father’s face as the little girl began to walk back up the stairs.

“But I won’t,” Jervis said, smile slipping from his face, replaced with an exaggerated sadness. As he spoke, the footsteps on the stairs stopped. “They’re not to blame in this little game. You thought you could run, but you can’t escape what you’ve done.”

A pointed cough came from the dark corner behind him, and Jervis resisted the urge to roll his eyes.

“But alas, I’ve said my piece. You’re dismissed,” he added almost as an afterthought, waving a hand to his father’s still-hypnotized family. They filed back upstairs, gaze as vacant as before. 

“But before I go,” Jervis added, “shall I introduce you to my Scarecrow?” 

Jon stepped out from the shadows. Even to someone who knew him, he was barely recognizable as a person. His eyes, the only part of him visible underneath the costume, glowed black when they met Jervis’s.

Jervis stepped around Jon, placing his fingers on the rough burlap of his chest possessively. “Don’t have too much fun.” He spoke just loud enough for his father to hear, mouth inches away from Jon’s ear. “It wouldn’t do for him to forget any of this.”

He could hear the smile in Jon’s voice when he said “My pleasure.” Jon slowly walked toward Mr. Tetch, the light from Jervis’s candle flickering off the green vials and sharp needles he held.

Jervis flashed his father a self-satisfied smile and sat back in the shadows, content to watch Jon do his work.

 

“Well,” Jervis said when the first bird of the morning started to chirp, “that was nice.” Jon stood in the center of the room, over the collapsed body of Jervis’s father, whose body had recently decided it couldn’t take any more fear while remaining conscious. 

Jon nodded slowly. 

“Shall we?” He rose from his chair and offered Jon his arm in an exaggerated fashion. Jon didn’t take it, and Jervis tried not to be offended. He mostly succeeded.

They made it to the front step before Jervis asked “Are you feeling alright? You seem awfully quiet.”

Jon shrugged. “It feels different, wearing the mask. I feel,” he trailed off, looking for the right word before continuing. “Powerful. It’s different than just being me. It’s like I’m more than me.”

Jervis nodded. He was not entirely sure he understood what Jon was trying to say, but Jon had always had a far different relationship to the concept of self than he had.

“And don’t call me your Scarecrow, either. It’s not yours. It’s barely even mine.” Jon hadn’t taken off the mask, but he picked at his sleeve in a familiar way he never would have done a few moments ago.

“Apologies.”

In silence, the two of them walked into the street. Though the far-off birds signaled the approach of sunrise, the night was still dismally black. The street, lined with the houses of rich families like the one he had just torn apart, was vacant. It must have rained while they’d been inside, though the clouds were gone now - dark puddles reflected the sliver of a moon countless times on the sidewalk.

Jervis’s life had long been an exercise in mimicry. Since he had never had a mother and barely had a father, he had learned how to be a person from books. For the most part, that had worked. He had done well enough for himself, and he had cared for Alice above all things. Books did not help him now, as he and Jon stood in the street outside his father’s house. Jervis had considered killing his father, as he lay there unconscious in a puddle of his own urine. A life for a life, he had thought. In the end, he let him live simply because he did not matter. Because he could not remember Alice, and how he had failed her, if he was dead.

Below the euphoria, below the sense of righteousness, lay an aching sense of want. This was not the ache of missing Alice; that had become ever-present but muted. He did not think he wanted the kind of stable life and family his father had, though he knew he had wanted it in the past and could again in the future. Since he could not identify it, he ignored it. After all, he did not know what revenge should feel like.

Generally, in the books about revenge Jervis had read, the revenge resulted in the death of the protagonist. Even if it was not a revenge tragedy, if the book was about the actual acquiring of the revenge, it ended once the goal was accomplished. Neither of those could help Jervis, who had accomplished his goal without his story ending. 

In the twenty-one years of his life, Jervis could not think of a time, before the last week when he had decided to leave the island, when he had a plan. Plans had never mattered before. Now, he stood in the middle of a dark street and realized that he had nowhere to go. 

A tattered, water-stained piece of paper fluttered down the street towards them. It came to rest in a puddle, where they both looked down on it. Red text on a yellow background advertised a circus in town. Below the text (two words embellished more than the rest - “Knife Thrower”) was a simple drawing of a young woman with a long ponytail, tight black outfit, and lots of knives.

“Shall we go see a show?” Jervis asked.

Jon shrugged. “Might as well.”

 

Understandably, the circus doesn’t tend to be performing before dawn on drizzly spring mornings. They weren’t performing in the afternoon either, which was when Jervis woke up. Not long after dawn, he and Jon had collapsed on the floor near their trunk, with only a blanket in between them and the splinter-filled floor. The floor was an incredibly uncomfortable place to sleep, Jervis noted as he sat up and his back cracked, but at least he’d slept. 

Beside him, Jon lay curled up in a ball and with another blanket (Jervis didn’t know where this one came from; he was quite certain they had only packed the one) pulled over his shoulders. His hair stuck out in every direction and his eyes were tightly closed. The Scarecrow costume was thrown haphazardly across the room, burlap and straw blending in with the abandoned feeling of the whole house. 

“I’ll be back in a bit,” Jervis said softly. Jon just pulled the blanket up and over his face.

When he returned, carrying a bag of food he had requested from a very rich-looking man who lived a couple of streets away, Jon had put away the scarecrow costume and sat back down with the blanket on his lap. 

“Breakfast?” Jervis asked cheerily.

Jon eyed the bag suspiciously. “Thanks.”

“So did you want to do that test today?” Jervis asked several minutes later around a mouthful of sandwich. “See if you can hypnotize people?”

“We probably should. For scientific integrity.” Jon threw an apple in the air until it almost hit the ceiling and caught it again.

“Aren’t you curious?”

He nodded. “That too.”

 

The first test told them everything they needed to know. Jon, pocketwatch in hand, had approached a middle-aged woman on a side street as Jervis lurked around a corner.

“Can you hear my watch ticking?” He’d asked.

The woman looked down her nose at him, a truly impressive feat considering Jon was nearly a foot taller than her. “Whatever you’re selling, I’m not buying. Move along.”

“It has a very distinctive noise, don’t you think?” Jon said, looking her in the eyes.

“Kids these days!” The woman tutted, sidestepping Jon and walking away. Jervis winced.

“So we know it’s not just the watch,” he offered, stepping back out into the street as the woman turned a corner at the end of the block.

“Definitely,” Jon said, shaking his head. “But the question remains if you can do it with a different watch, or if the combination is necessary.”

“This is the only watch I have.”

Jon raised an eyebrow at him. 

 

After successfully lifting a watch from the pocket of a gentleman walking in a nearby park, Jervis was ready. The new watch didn’t have a gold cover like his; it was a silver-faced thing with the time permanently displayed. It felt different in his hand somehow. If he didn’t know that both were inanimate, he would have almost said less alive. 

This time, their target was a young man emerging from a carriage. 

“Excuse me, sir,” Jervis said walking up to him. “Can you hear my watch ticking?”

The man raised an eyebrow. “Yes, what of it?”

“It has a very distinctive noise, don’t you think?” He looked into the man’s eyes, which was somewhat difficult as the man was taller than him and not paying him much attention. “It almost matches with your heartbeat.”

“So it does,” the man observed. “I really must be going.”

“Just a moment - the ticking is rather curious, isn’t it?” He refused to break eye contact, and slowly, he could see the will to leave drain from the other man’s eyes. 

“Yes.” 

“Would you tap that street sign?” Jervis asked, pointing to one at the far end of the block.

“Why?”

“Just do it.”

Much to the puzzlement of the still-present carriage driver, the man walked back the way he had come, tapped the street sign, and walked back.

“Like that?”

“Just so, thank you,” Jervis smiled.

 

“Well, I think that settles it,” Jervis said as he and Jon walked back to their temporary home. “That was much more difficult with the new watch, so it has to be some sort of combination of me and my watch.”

“But it did still work with the new watch, so it could just be you.”

“True, but shouldn’t it have been easier if it was just me?”

“This seems like the sort of thing that needs practice. You’re more used to your watch, so it’s easier with that one.”

“True.” Then, almost as an afterthought, he added “I like my watch, though.”

“It certainly is stylish,” Jon laughed. 

For a few minutes, they walked in silence, passing block after block of houses. The sun was starting to dip lower in the sky, and taller houses occasionally blocked it out, sending long shadows over the streets. 

“Does this mean you’re magic?” Jon asked, determinedly looking at the sky.

“I don’t think so. That would be,” he trailed off for a second, “incredible.”

“Yeah. But so is mind control.”

Jervis sighed. “I guess so.”

When they were almost back to their house, they passed a row of posters tacked up on the wall of a building. They were done in the same red and yellow as the poster they’d found the previous night, but there were so many more of them. The dangerous-looking woman labeled “Knife Thrower” was still there, but she was joined by a man so muscular he was almost square-shaped, lifting comically large barbells while roaring, labeled “Strong Man” and a small woman with curly brown hair in a shiny leotard whose body was twisted into an impossible shape labeled “Contortionist.”

Jon pointed at the posters. “Hey, weren’t we going to see the show?”

“That was the plan, yes,” Jervis said with a smile.

 

The circus was nothing like Jervis expected. It was just so much, all the time. So many people, probably more than he’d ever seen before. It certainly felt that way, at least. So many attractions - in addition to the main show in the big tent, there were at least a dozen smaller ones along the side, each offering a different sort of spectacle. There was someone who could eat fire, and someone said to be the world’s strongest man, and a woman who could twist her body into unnatural shapes.

In each tent, and in the walkways in between, was a sea of people. They came out in droves - the rich in their furs and silks, and the poor in their ragged clothes with soot or oil still under their fingers. The sun was setting, and they were cast in the yellow glow of lamps placed at strategic intervals, leaving no room for the oncoming shadows. It must be the opening night, Jervis guessed. Either that, or there were more people in this city than he had ever thought possible.

The crowd was intoxicating. Everyone rushed around, but no one saw them. To everyone else, Jon and Jervis were just two more bodies in this sea, completely overlooked except for when they happened to be standing in someone else’s way. Just for now, he was no one, and it forced him to stay in the present, in his own mind, in a way he didn’t entirely enjoy but which was too different for him to do anything other than get swept up in it.

“Where should we go first?” He asked, his gaze flitting over the countless different signs before them.

Beside him, Jon shrugged. When he looked over at him, Jervis saw that Jon had hunched his shoulders and generally retreated into his clothes in what appeared to be an almost unconscious effort to make himself look smaller.

“Hey, are you okay?”

Jon nodded. “Yeah. It’s just a lot - it’s different.”

Jervis nodded in agreement.

A few minutes later, they sat down in the big tent. The seats were staggered, with each row being a little higher up than the one in front of it. Their seats were near the back, so they sat high above the ring. The ring itself was empty, as the show here hadn’t quite begun yet, but most of the seats were full, and boys carrying trays of popcorn and peanuts walked up and down the aisles selling their goods. 

“Would you like anything?” Jervis asked.

Jon raised an eyebrow. “We don’t have money.”

“I don’t need money.”

“I know.”

“So would you like me to get you anything?”

“It’s a lot to get used to.”

Jervis raised an eyebrow. 

“All of this.” Jon waved his hand at nothing in particular. “The people, the city, everything. We moved. And you can control people’s minds! It’s just a lot to take in.”

The elderly couple in the seats next to them turned their heads when Jon mentioned the hypnosis, but they quickly pretended not to have heard when Jon gave them his best death glare. He could be terrifying even without the mask, Jervis thought proudly. He just hoped that death glare was never turned on him.

“I know.”

Jon opened his mouth to speak and promptly shut it again. 

“Does it bother you?”

The crowd hushed as a tall man in a red and black outfit walked to the center of the ring. “Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to tonight’s show!” He said, and somehow his voice boomed through the entire tent. Jon gave Jervis a ‘We’ll talk later’ look, then turned to the ring as an elephant entered.

 

The show was the most fantastical thing Jervis had ever seen. Every part of it was brighter than anything he’d ever seen - the elephants, draped in their red cloth and gold adornments, were just the beginning. The light bounced off the skintight green and pink costumes of the jugglers, who rolled around the rink balancing on giant balls while tossing glinting knives in the air. The clowns, with their painted faces and red wigs, were dressed every color of the rainbow as they joked with the audience. And when the acrobats came out, he thought it surely must be Wonderland. They soared through the sky above him, flipping in midair as they threw each other from beam to beam fearlessly. The wind howled outside, but somehow the thin canvas walls protected them, kept Jervis hidden in a beautiful world he half thought he was imagining.

Afterwards, though the wind had died down, the night air was too cold for April. Jervis barely noticed it. He and Jon did not speak as they walked back to their hideout together; Jervis was far too lost in his head. When they arrived, though it was late and he should by all rights have been tired, he was far too wired to sleep. Instead, he merely dressed for bed and lay down, intending to run through his memories of the evening all night. Alice would have liked to see it, he thought. 

“Jon?” Jervis asked much later, lying on his back and staring into the dark that blocked his view of the ceiling.

“Hm?” Came the response from the patch of floor next to him.

“Everything is so different here. It was so bright, and the people - it looked like they were flying.”

“It was loud,” he said, and Jervis knew he didn’t just mean the volume.

“It was like a dream, but all right there in front of me.”

A few moments passed before Jon spoke. “What happens now?”

“Whatever do you mean?” Asked Jervis, who knew perfectly well what he meant.

Jon sat up and looked down at Jervis. “We are sleeping on the floor of an abandoned house and the only reason I know we will have food tomorrow is because you can make people give it to you, which is scary, not just because it makes me totally dependent on you, but also because you can do mind control and yes I know you’re going to say it’s hypnotism so it’s ‘different’ but it’s not, really, and neither of us knows anything about where we are, and we have no path forward.”

“You carry concentrated fear in your pocket, so I think we are even,” Jervis said, sitting up and pulling the blanket over his shoulders, though the night wasn’t cold.

“That’s hardly the extent of what I said, and you know it.”

This was quickly shaping up to be the first time he had ever fought with Jon, and he didn’t like it at all. Even when Jon hadn’t been speaking to him, Jervis had never had this creeping sense he’d done something wrong before. He twisted his fingers in the blanket.

“Tonight was fun, right? Why can’t we just have fun?”

“Because we’re not kids anymore, Jervis. Because you decided we were leaving home, and now we could get arrested, or murdered. If we hadn’t found this house, we would be sleeping on the street. And because while I don’t know about you, I didn’t leave to have fun. I left to finally become something, and I certainly can’t do that if we are just going to the circus all the time.”

“Why not?” Jervis asked, and when Jon gave him a look and opened his mouth to speak, he hurriedly continued. “I could take as much money as we need, but you don’t want me to do that, though I don’t understand why. So if we worked at the circus, they would pay us, and I believe they provide food and accomodation as well.”

“What would I do? Your skill is obvious, they can market the hypnotism, but they wouldn’t take kindly to terrifying their patrons, and I’m not going to shovel elephant dung for a living.”

Admittedly, Jervis hadn’t gotten much past the initial idea in his spur-of-the-moment plan. He tried to make his face unreadable as he racked his brain for an idea, but wasn’t sure if he succeeded. 

“You can draw.”

“Caricatures?” Jon asked with a look that made his view of that idea very clear.

“Do you have another idea?”

“No.”

“Then we’ll see about it tomorrow.” He lay down, facing away from Jon, and wrapped himself in the blanket once more. There was a rustling behind him as Jon too lay back down, and he didn’t need to look to know that Jon lay with his back to him and his arms crossed.

A few minutes later, Jon spoke into the darkness. “If we work at the circus, you’re getting me books.”

“As many as you’d like.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I said it would take me a semester to write the next chapter, and yeah I wasn't wrong. This is a lot shorter of a chapter than I thought it would be, but don't be fooled. All the stuff I have planned is still going to happen (and about 10k of that is already written!) I just wanted to get a chapter out. This chapter was originally supposed to be the intro to the third and final chapter, but if you checked the chapter count you'll see that's changed - I've made this intro and the conclusion/epilogue their own chapters, just because a 20+k chapter seemed ridiculous. As a result though, not that much stuff really happened here. I didn't get to the other characters or the shippy stuff, but it's coming. I promise. All I can say is that yeah, it's been 5 months. But it's been an absolutely hellish 5 months. And I hope to have the next chapter out very soon (what that means is very much open to interpretation).  
> Shoutout to @boossuet for a really enthusiastic comment that honestly motivated me so much and to Zo for basically being this fic's cheerleader. Comments are, as always, greatly appreciated.

**Author's Note:**

> This is planned out to be three chapters and maybe an epilogue. I am really looking forward to writing the next chapter, but I'm ridiculously bad at writing fast, so I don't know how long it will be before the next chapter is up. The rating will go up to Mature for chapter 2 for dark themes, but there won't be any nsfw content.  
> if anybody has a better title for this can i hear it please it took me four days to think of this and i still am none too happy with it.  
> Comments/kudos make my day, and if anybody has constructive criticism I'm open to hearing it.


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